One site in particular, however, has taken another approach. Instead of “blacking out” to protest SOPA, Fark.com has “gone white” in order to support the anti-piracy acts. In typical Fark fashion, frivolity reigns, but their message echoes what many other site owners are saying: “We don’t support SOPA,” only this time, it’s done with a tongue-in-cheek approach. Over at Fark.com, their white out in “support” of SOPA is for one reason and one reason only: the anti-piracy acts give them a perfect excuse to quit.

From Fark’s “white out” explanation:

While a bunch of other sites are going “dark” to protest SOPA/PIPA, we’re over the moon about the whole thing. Why? Honestly, we’ve been bringing you the latest news happening across the internet for 12 years, and we’re tired. And SOPA/PIPA is the perfect excuse to quit.

The Fark admins continue their lament:

While SOPA might be “almost dead,” it’s not quite all the way there, and under various drafts of both SOPA/PIPA, Fark could have its DNS assignment (the thing that turns an IP address, like 10.0.0.1, into words like Fark.com) revoked without notice simply for linking to content that could come under foreign copyright claims. This means, even if it is actual news in and of itself, if we link to it, we can be shut down. And thank God, cause we’re about ready to crack under the strain of being on top of the news all the time.

A screenshot of the Fark.com welcome screen demonstrates their commitment to SOPA support:

Offering a quality website does take a lot of work, so Fark’s position is understandable. Drew Curtis’ crew also post a video explaining why we, the people, should support SOPA. It’s some compelling stuff that we should keep in mind the next time Lamar Smith explains why his anti-piracy act is worth supporting:

It should also be noted that, unlike other sites that have blacked out protesting SOPA, you can still access Fark.com’s content, and if you navigate to the fark.com/index.html address, you’ll bypass the site’s whiteout splash screen.

This week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt addressed the American Society of News Editors. This came shortly after Rupert Murdoch started going on about blocking search engines, yet again. Schmidt hinted at new ways of making money around online news content being developed (and Google working on this itself). If you’ve got 45 minutes to kill, you can check out Schmidt’s keynote below.

With the recent release of Apple’s iPad (and even since its initial announcement), there has been a lot of talk about the device playing a role in "saving journalism." I like Drew Curtis of Fark’s take on this mentality – gluing four iPhones together is going to save journalism? In actuality, "Journalism’s fine," he said in an interview we did with him at SXSW last month:

"The problem you’ve got with journalists is, all of us have got an area of expertise we know something about, and if you read an article in a newspaper about the area of expertise you know something about, they get it wrong right? It turns out that even the journalists get the newspaper industry wrong, and they’re in it, but they’re not like making the decisions about what’s happening, so there’s not really this conscious understanding of what’s actually going on."

At the news editor event, Schmidt made some comments about blogging that got a few people riled up as he highlighted the need for editors, and while there is certainly merit to his point, Curtis’ point about journalists getting things wrong has merit of its own, and that’s why there is certainly room for both styles of reporting.

Schmidt must feel the same way, considering Google owns Blogger, Blog Search, and includes blogs in Google News. The fact of the matter is, there is plenty of room for error in either venue, and frankly, online, the lines between so-called professional journalism and blogging are often quite gray.

I think we’re going to see some more interesting and creative methods for news delivery and consumption in the not-too-distant future (here’s an interesting one that’s already out there), which is what Curtis says the newspaper industry needs, and what Schmidt seems to indicate Google is working on as we speak.

The New York Mets wisely built an out into their online poll for fans to pick an 8th inning song. Cubs fans had Harry Caray leading the chorus of ‘Take Me Out To The Ball Game’ for years, while the Orioles’ choice of ‘Thank God I’m A Country Boy’ is a lot more fun than you might imagine.

For the Mets, the poll’s suggested choices also included a write-in option. That was far too tempting for the legions of giggling pranksters at Fark, where someone suggested the poll needed a dose of Rickroll.

If you’ve ever clicked a link touted as one thing, only to have it pop up a video of Astley’s 80′s era hit song, you’ve been Rickrolled. It’s an Internet thing.

However, Omar Minaya didn’t work hard at bringing Johan Santana to Flushing just to have his star lefty, or the rest of the team, suffer through a Rickrolling at every home game. The New York Daily News said there will be a runoff of all the songs during the first six games of a homestand.

Whichever of the selections receives the largest crowd response will be the 8th inning sing-along song. “Mets officials suggested the initial results didn’t necessarily force the runoff, saying the rules stipulated Internet voters would “help decide” the outcome,” the report said.

After last September’s epic collapse where the Mets dropped out of the playoff race, upper management ought to hope the fans never want to give them up. If the fans pick Bon Jovi’s ‘Living on a Prayer’ as the song, I may have to switch to rooting for the Yankees.

Kentucky State Representative, Tim Couch

In summary, House Bill 775 would require anyone who wants to leave a comment on a Web site to register their real name, address, and e-mail address with the Web site. They would be expected to use their real name whenever they commented. Web site operators who would not abide by the law would be fined $500 for the first offense and $1,000 for any additional violation.

Considering how powerful the issue is, the WebProNews video department tried repeatedly to contact Representative Tim Couch for a video interview. When Mr. Couch returned our calls, he declined the interview saying he was overwhelmed with the feedback this bill has brought.

Mr.Couch says his name has been slashed all over the blogosphere for this bill. I tried to persuade him the interview would give him the opportunity to explain to the blogosphere his original intentions, but he still declined saying:

“I only wanted to make a statement, and I did.”

Mr. Couch told me over the phone that he is being attacked on the Internet. He has received countless e-mails and phone calls not only at his office, but also at his home. His daughter received a call that contained severe “foul language.”

He said, “I am not a Communist,” like he thinks the blogosphere is making him out to be.

On the Lexington Herald-Leader blog, Pol Watchers, John Cheves gives the explanation that Mr. Couch was trying to protect the children in his district.

"Some nasty things have been said about high school kids in my district, usually by other kids. The adults get in on it, too."

Drew Curtis of the famous Fark.com, which is based in Kentucky, wrote, “Kentucky lawmaker wants to r-u-n-n-o-f-t largest website in the state. Drew looking forward to moving Fark to the Cayman Islands.”

Mr. Couch also told WebProNews that he does not think the bill will go anywhere especially after the strong response he’s received. He said he would like the negativity to stop, and he’s very busy at the moment working on the state budget.

NSFW, for Not Safe For Work, is one of those Internet memes that seems to have been around as long as the Web has supported image viewing. Generally, it refers to images that, if seen over one’s shoulder in the workplace by a particularly sensitive third party, could result in the viewer being fired.

Audio can be just as workplace-unfriendly as well. But sexual images hit a nerve with people, to the point where companies with Internet use policies make people agree not to view such content on their work computers.

NSFW has been around in general usage for years, but good luck pinning down the first time it was used. We can’t imagine Curtis sending out the lawyers against anyone who forwards a link to someone with NSFW tacked on to it as a warning, should the USPTO grant the trademark.

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The social bookmarking site has experienced exactly 20 hours and eleven minutes of downtime since May 3 of this year – that works out to about a 96 percent “success” rate, which sounds pretty respectable.  But, unfortunately for BlinkList, Royal Pingdom also measured its competitors’ downtime, and the results put BlinkList to shame.

Fark, Slashdot, Netscape, and Digg didn’t go down for as much as a single minute.  Del.icio.us was down for just five, and Meneame and StumbleUpon trailed with 24 and 33 minutes of downtime, respectively.

The next three social bookmarking sites did notably worse, but still not as poorly as BlinkList.  Royal Pingdom measured one hour and 28 minutes of downtime for Reddit, two hours and six minutes for Newsvine, and four hours and 28 minutes for Furl.

And, yes, then there’s BlinkList, with its 20 hours and six minutes.  I mean, goodness, by the time we reach a number as high as “20,” we’re supposed to represent it with digits, not numbers.  And the outages weren’t just quick blips; Royal Pingdom reports, “The longest individual downtime for the Blinklist website was 4 hours and 46 minutes.”

Royal Pingdom offered “[o]ne possible explanation,” however, which “could be that Blinklist is having scaling issues (a.k.a. growing pains).”  For BlinkList’s sake, let’s hope that’s the case, or else the company and site could be in for a shrinking user base.

1. Akash Garg of hi5
2. Sean Suhl of Suicide Girls
3. Max Levchin of Slide
4. James Hong of HotorNot
5. Markus Frind of PlentyofFish
6. Drew Curtis of Fark

Now, some of that may be because I‘m about to moderate a panel myself on User Gen, and I want to emulate Guy’s success here, but it’s also because I loved finding out how these guys created such viral communities.

Funniest comment:

Drew said they were taking alot of flack from the Washington Post because one of their headlines had said Anna Nicole Smith’s condition was *upgraded* to dead.

Most interesting:

None of these guys planned to go where they are with these companies, they followed their users ideas and they went with the natural flow of what was necessary. In fact, Sean said, in effect, the planning has to be loose, and you can’t just follow the rules.

Most consoling:

Turns out fear is ok. When I think about this blog or anything I’ve created, I always wonder when it’s all going to end. I know I’m not alone as so many entries on the blogosphere (and off) have to do with ‘the bubble bursting’, but I was consoled that Max says he’s often terrified that it will all disappear too. Made me feel better to know there was someone else out there that was obsessive about it.

Most exciting:

James says passion is everything. Just like I say about blogging that you won’t succeed if you don’t like what you are doing (ie pick a topic you love), James says you have to love what you do as an entrepreneur. If you can’t be passionate and love your product, then find something you can love and go with it.

The ‘duh moment (that everyone needs to understand):

Listen to your users. Passionate users know your product, even better than you do. When they talk you need to listen. Slide would be an entirely different product without user suggestions.

Although, I’d insert the fact that Markus says some users should NOT be listened to. Use your brain, and think about where your bread and butter is. Don’t implement stuff just because it was asked for… Some features are not helpful and could actually destroy the community you have created (ie chat rooms full of married people on a dating site).

On Marketing:

Most of these guys said that marketing was of little value to them (gasp). They said the viral things that really made them successful was an accident. Sure you can come up with a great idea, but the real truth is that if your company is doing something cool, people will talk about it.

HotorNot said that by the end of day one they had 40K unique users, and within a week they were seeing millions of page views per day. They showed it to cube-locked geeks (Intel workers, ironically) and they passed it around immediately. Sean from Suicide Girls says they spent tons of energy on a CSI episode in which their girls were featured, with no result and got a ton of result from a column on their site and from a YouTube video one of their girls uploaded (she was lipsyncing to a Hall and Oats song).

Now, as a marketing consultant, I want to disagree, but I can’t… Communities are where it’s at, and marketing has to make their job showcasing the communities that have evolved naturally and making them more user-friendly (off-site buys+clear, directioned thinking involving on-site assets). Marketing isn’t dead, but it’s way different than it was just last year.

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Manga, for the uninitiated, is a style of art popularized by Japanese graphic novels. As of Groundhog Day, 22-year-old Matsumoto’s online comic, “Saturnalia,” will be five years old. In that time, Space (as she now will be known) found a home in the online comic community, and at deviantART.com.

If there are any manga-devotees at the office, you may have seen her work as a computer screen background, or her cover art for the novella “Sass Girls X.” But those triumphs are small compared to when the Internet got a hold of “Simpsonzu,” an intricately illustrated manga version of the megapopular Fox series, “The Simpsons.”

The title “Simpsonzu” mimics a Japanese accent that generally avoids ending syllables with consonants – a native Japanese speaker would very likely say “seem-psan-zu.”

Space tells WebProNews that before Simpsonzu reached the audiences of Digg.com, Fark, Drawn.ca, and ABC News Australia, her deviantArt page had amassed 70,000 page views in four years.

“A couple of days after putting up Simpsonzu,” says Space via email, “that number doubled. It’s been less than three weeks now, and as I write this, the page view count reads 389,407.”

Digg.com users took all the credit, but Space says it was the Internet as a whole, with its avalanche-like word-of-mouth quality, that she thanks for the recognition.

“I’d never been to Digg before. The person who submitted the pictures may have never seen my art before, for all I know. I have deviantART to thank for the quick exposure.”

Other than deviantART, how does she market herself online?

“I don’t!” she says. “I believe the best publicity is word of mouth. The more appealing my work is, the more it’ll be exposed through people telling other people about it.”

Yes, that has been the elusive golden goose for scores of marketers – that buzz thing, which once again leaves them scrambling for something authentic and compelling.

But it wasn’t any of these social media sites that caught the attention of “The Simpsons” creator Matt Groening, who had been looking for a manga artist to his specifications but hadn’t found one.

Simpsonzu , along with Space’s tribute to “Futurama,” were posted at work by employees of Bongo Entertainment, Groening’s comic publishing company, and at Fox.

Apparently, Groening saw Simpsonzu and “loved it.”

“Even if he hated it and called me a hack and how dare I ruin his characters, I still would’ve considered it an honour, knowing he saw my art. That’s how much of a fan I am.”

Space landed herself a job with 20th Century Fox designing art for Futurama merchandise, and is now in talks with Bongo Comics about developing a Simpsons manga.

“Why all this sudden success? Why are my childhood dreams coming true? This is madness,” she writes on her blog.

For the rest of us, “why” doesn’t really matter, nor is the question that perplexing – but then again, it’s not happening to us.

Simpsonzu will be published in this week’s ZOO Magazine in the UK; the Toronto Star introduces Nina in Canada; and next month’s issue of ImagineFX will run a story about hot new manga artist Space Matsumoto.

But WebProNews is the first to know her real name, which, by the way, has its own prophetic quality. Her middle name, Sachie, means “lucky picture.”

If I had made that up, you wouldn’t believe it.

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