With SOPA & PIPA behind us, the next potential threat to the internet we know and love is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). ACTA may go much further than SOPA or PIPA ever could have. These agreements have been negotiated in secret between many countries including the United States, Japan, Canada, the European Union and more. Combined efforts to halt invasive legislation that harms all internet users succeeded once and they can succeed again. When you are done enjoying this blog post visit these sites to learn more about ACTA and decide for yourself whether or not opposition is needed:

-          http://www.stopacta.info/

-          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement

-          https://www.eff.org/issues/acta

-          http://www.ustr.gov/acta

To honor those who stood up and joined the fight on January 18^th 2012 we thought it would be fun to document the different anti-SOPA/PIPA blackout web pages that we could find. The events of January 18th, 2012 go to show that when people band together a difference truly can be made. What an incredible world we could create if the online community stood together to make a change in other important matters.

Without further ado…

941mediaproject.com

This was my favorite by far.  I think it speaks for itself.

 

theoatmeal.com

This one made me laugh. Here’s a very creative set of images that I hope will make you laugh too.

Click to laugh - http://theoatmeal.com/sopa

 

wikipedia.org

 

wordpress.org

Find a list of all anti-SOPA related Wordpress plugins that were available at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/sopa.

 

wordpress.com

Joining its sister site, wordpress.com provided a nice mock-up of what the internet could have looked like under the proposed SOPA / PIPA legislation.

 

wired.com

 

 

imgur.com

 

minecraft.net

Minecraft had one of the brighter and more distinct designs of the day.

 

icanhascheezburger.com

All sites in the cheezburger network had theez light boxes displaying their distaste for SOPA & PIPA.

 

mashable.com

 

reddit.com

 

boingboing.net

The near blacked out screen of boingboing’s homepage was symbolic of the blacked out internet resulting from the SOPA & PIPA legislation if it had passed.

 

urbanspoon.com

Our favorite restaurant finder had a tasty little morsel of anti SOPA propaganda for us on their sidebar.

 

mozilla.org

Mozilla went a bit further than most and gave us some tidbits of info on the who, what, where, when & why of the SOPA & PIPA legislation.

 

moveon.org

 

craigslist.org

 

sopastrike.com

The nice people over at sopastrike.com also created this template for anyone to use.

 

vimeo.com

 

This great design was created by Zach Johnson and was shown on his website zachstronaut.com where it could be downloaded by all. A few of the bigger names to use this template were postsecret.com, michaelmoore.com and greenpeace.org. Check out the cool shadow & light effect!

 

digibase.ca

The good people at Digibase Operations, a non-profit technology research and development organization, took it ACTA as well as SOPA and PIPA.

 

 

vladgorenshteyn.tumblr.com

Vlad Gorenshteyn had the most adorable anti-SOPA / PIPA website. Just look at the eyes of that future little social networker. Stop SOPA for the children! It’s for the children!! 

 

 

rawstory.com

 

www.ccianet.org

The Computer & Communications Industry Association got in on the blackout.

 

gamepolitics.com

 

eff.org

 

nvca.org

 

namecheap.com

 

dotsub.com

 

moveon.org

 

vanillaforums.org

 

red5studios.com

 

torproject.org

 

webhostingbuzz.com

 

ragemaker.net

 

destructoid.com

Another great image from Destructiod...

 

asofterworld.com

 

identi.ca

 

majorleaguegaming.com

 

crypto.cat

 

colossalmind.com

 

bitbucket.org

 

infospace.ischool.syr.edu

The only school I found taking part (although there were probably others) was the Syracuse University School of Informational Studies.

 

nomacs.org

 

computerhope.com

 

spursofthemoment.com

 

shorttraveltips.com

 

freeinternetpress.com

 

youn00b.com

 

popculturemadness.com

 

celebritymagnet.com

 

americancensorship.org

Check out this site if you want to learn more about who was behind all the fuss on 1/18/2012.

 

occupybirmingham.co.uk

All the way from the good ol’ UK. Thanks for your support!

 

turkreno.com

This page was both informative and fun to read.

 

thetaoofpooh.com

The Tao of Pooh website had the ultimate minimalist anti-SOPA page.

 

jameswadeweaver.com

 

sopablackout.org

 

rockandwater.net

Nothing here? Look in the top left corner.

 

elderscrolls.wikia.com

This Elder Scrolls wiki had the most official looking design. This could have been what your favorite website looked like if SOPA and PIPA were passed.

 

rockkit.com

 

ronbercume.com

 

jazzsequence.com

 

plaguemusic.com

 

theskaterrack.com

 

whitehouse.gov1.info

This fake White House website got in on the protest.

 

memphisghost.com

 

thegeekychic.wordpress.com

 

Bluefirestudios.com, mgtrepair.net and many others displayed this template created and shared with mutual dislike of the proposed regulations.

 

travelswithdavid.wordpress.com

Travels with David had a welcoming personalized message for all of his readers informing them why his site was blacked out due to the protest of the Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

 

stormchaser1.net

 

twitpic.com

 

cdt.org

The Center for Democracy & Technology had a cool slideshow which we have gracefully captured just for your pure viewing enjoyment. I don’t have a cool slideshow for you but I do have screenshots of a slideshow...

 

And last but not least… Google

Not that you really need a link Google but I just out of principle I can’t give you one because nearly 1/5 of all the keywords in my analytics are (not provided). No love from you = no love from me. L

 

Here is an article on how Google slowed down spiders to avoid penalizing blacked out sites (this still doesn’t make up for all the (not provided)’s in my Google Analytics). - http://techland.time.com/2012/01/18/google-slows-down-spiders-to-avoid-penalizing-blacked-out-sites/

Click here for a cool infographic from the big G - https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/

Google Vs. Facebook: Converting Visitors

Which is more valuable? a Facebook vistor or Google Visitor?

Accourind to a Chitika study of 70 million  impressions, " Google does a "much better job" at driving traffic and making sure it converts."

While Google Adwords (PPC) Click Through Rates can be roughly 2% compared to .3% for contextual advertising (ie facebook), Search cannot drive the number of impressions contextual advertising can. Therefore if your goal is brand awareness related you may consider focusing more on Facebook. If you're focus is on Clicks and Conversions you may want to focus on Search. Remember Adwords or PPC advertising CTR's are typically 2% the #1 organic ranked site can get CTR's of up to 42%! PPC = good, organic SEO = Better! when it comes to clicks, visitors and conversions.

Thanks for checking in!

Hey, Phil here.

I was browsing the MSN website the other day and came across this link: http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/12/02/5567082-google-sucker-punches-online-retail-bully?gt1=43001. Essentially, a business was intentionally upsetting its customers with poor customer service (threatening lives, swearing at them) so that these customers would blog about and write poor reviews for the company. As we know in the SEO world, any reference is a good reference, so as a result, the company shot to the top of the rankings. Not until I read this article did I even think that bad reviews would help increase a website's rankings, but it makes sense. Thankfully, Google caught on and changed the algorithm to penalize poor reviews.

On the web dev front, I've been trying to make a mission of reading every article in .NET magazine. It's such a great source for all things web-related from SEO, to devving, to graphic design. The smallest blurb could provide a great info and inspiration. There was an article regarding implementing transitions in CSS3 to allow for a more robust user experience, using the ":target" pseudo-class. Now, I'm currently working on a website that had pretty long list of FAQs. where the questions are at the top, and when you click on them, you are directed to the answer to the question on the same page. I thought I'd try this technique out, but didn't get it to work like in the article. What ended up happening though was an accidental user experience enhancement! You can see it here: http://seattlend.com/faq. When users click on a question, not only are they redirected to the answer, but it's highlighted so that the user doesn't have rescan the page for what they were inquiring about. This was all achieved with some simple CSS! Here's the code:

<style type="text/css">
     li.question:target { color: #679e43; }    
</style>
...
<ul>
     <li><a href="#visit">What can I expect...</a></li>
     <li><a href="#insurance">Will my medical insurance plan cover...</a></li>
     ...
</ul>
<ul>
     <li class="question" id="visit">What can I expect...</li>
     <li class="answer">Your first...</li>
     <li class="question" id="insurance">Will my medical insurance plan cover...</li>
     <li class="answer">Most major medical...</li>
</ul>

To reemphasize, a user clicks on "What can I expect" then the page jumps directly to the same question but with a different text color, and the answer below it. What do you guys think? As a user, do you appreciate this? I was completely floored at how much difference having the question highlighted made for me -- I was more engaged and more likely to read the answer. That just me though, I'm amused by the simplest things :-) What do you think? Take care and until next time...

That's right I said it. This blog post is going to show you the BEST way to integrate video into a web site and I'll tell you why.

Everyone knows Video is a great tool on a web site. Nobody reads on the web and video keeps visitors attention and most importantly ON YOUR WEB SITE.  But Video files are large and slow down the speed of your web site. But not any more!  We've developed a creative way of adding video to your web site that doens't load the video until the user clicks on the video AND adds a view to your youtube video AND speeds up your sites' loading speed.

Without Further introduction:

The BEST way to integrate video into your web site!

 

 

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President | Bonsai Media Group