He’s right, and SOPA is still a concern as well. While it has been delayed, SOPA is not dead (just ask SOPA author Lamar Smith). It is entirely possible that SOPA could resurrect once a “consensus is reached.” SOPA must be destroyed while vulnerable.

And presumably, that’s why many sites will still participate in a scheduled blackout on Wednesday, January 18th to protest the legislation.

Update: 12:00 AM January 18 – View Live Protests:
Wikipedia
Google
Craigslist
Boing Boing
MineCraft
WordPress

Do you support sites like Wikipedia going dark in protest of SOPA and PIPA? Or do you feel that it’s the wrong move? Let us know in the comments.

Here are some of the bigger sites that will officially go dark on the 18th:

• reddit
• Wikipedia
• Mozilla
• Failblog, rest of the Cheezburger Network
• Boing Boing
• WordPress
• MoveOn.org
• TwitPic
• Minecraft.net
• Riot Games
• Epic Games
• 38 Studios
• Red 5 Studios
• Google will be changing their homepage
• Imgur
• Tor Project
• Miro
• iSchool at Syracuse University
• Oreilly.com
• Good Old Games
• Free Press
• Mojang
• XDA Developers
• Destructoid
• Good.is

Smaller sites can get in on the protest as well. A site, sopastrike.com, has been set up by the Fight for the Future non-profit. It allows anyone with a website to join the strike. The site’s list of all registered blackout participants contains hundreds of small websites.

If you want to participate in the blackout, you can use the Simple Stop SOPA WordPress plugin. It will blackout your site and show the following message in white:

This site has been blocked in protest of the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) two bills which will allow the government to censor the internet. Find out more at americancensorship.org or the video below. This website will return at 8pm.

It will also show this video about SOPA and PIPA. If you haven’t already seen it, it’s a nice video that explains the dangers of the legislation:

If you want a little more control on your blackout, you can try this other WordPress plugin.

Googler Pierre Far made a timely Google+ post Monday evening, coyly referencing the fact that sometimes webmasters feel the need to take their site offline for a day because of “server maintenance or as political protest.” He mentions this action as the most important one to take if you plan on having your site go dark for a day:

1. The most important point: Webmasters should return a 503 HTTP header for all the URLs participating in the blackout (parts of a site or the whole site). This helps in two ways:

a. It tells us it’s not the “real” content on the site and won’t be indexed.

b. Because of (a), even if we see the same content (e.g. the “site offline” message) on all the URLs, it won’t cause duplicate content issues.

2. Googlebot’s crawling rate will drop when it sees a spike in 503 headers. This is unavoidable but as long as the blackout is only a transient event, it shouldn’t cause any long-term problems and the crawl rate will recover fairly quickly to the pre-blackout rate. How fast depends on the site and it should be on the order of a few days.

You can see the entire list of tips here.

If you don’t own a site and want to spread the word of the blackout via social media, you can use the hashtag #sopastrike or #stopsopa all day. BlackoutSopa.org also allows for you to change your Twitter pic to one of three images – either a smaller “Stop SOPA” banner under your pic, a total “STOP SOPA” image or a simple blackout.

There is still a day until the SOPA blackout, which means the window is closing for other big-name sites to join in. Having Reddit and Wikipedia down is going to be a huge deal, and it would only get bigger if other social sites joined the blackout party.

But it appears that not everybody is joining the party. In response to Radar correspondent Alex Howard asking him if he had the “cojones” to join Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia in the blackout, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo had this to say:

He elaborated:

Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales agrees that Twitter should not go dark in protest –

He makes a distinction – that Twitter needs to be used to organize the protests. It’s a no-brainer that shutting down giant social media sites like Twitter and Facebook would severely hamper the ability to communicate about the protest. But if the purpose of the blackout is awareness, to send out a warning message, then nothing would be as jolting as seeing a site like Twitter go dark for an entire day.

Not all SOPA opponents feel that a blackout it a good way to tackle the unpopular legislation. As PandoDaily’s Paul Carr writes,

Arguing that a one-day closure reminds everyone of the importance of net freedom is like burning down one church to underscore the importance of the First Amendment for all of the others. Even if the shut-down did send an effective message, it’s still not Wikipedia’s call to make. If you ask the entire world for money to stay live, then you owe the entire world the courtesy of staying live, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

He also stresses that Wikipedia should stay neutral on policy issues, as they are dedicated to staying impartial in every other facet of the site. Jimmy Wales has responded to this concern as well:

So the English version of Wikipedia will be inaccessible for the purposes of article retrieval from 5am GMT to 5pm GMT on Wednesday. All visitors will see an open letter asking that they contact their representatives about SOPA/PIPA. Wales told the Telegraph:

“The general sentiment seemed to be that US law, as it impacts the internet, can affect everyone.”

Do you think that Wikipedia has a duty to stay neutral on the SOPA/PIPA issue? Or do they have a duty to take a stance because the legislation threatens the internet as a whole? Let us know in the comments.

Although SOPA was dealt a crushing blow this weekend, do you think that the demonstration is necessary to show people the real cost of internet censorship, so maybe legislation like SOPA won’t get this far in the future? Or do you think that blacking out a popular site for an entire day is too much, or even counterproductive? Do you think that it will work in swaying any SOPA supporters? Let us know in the comments.

White there is still a great deal of debate surrounding the possible efficacy vs. consequences of going dark for an entire day to protest domestic legislation, plenty of sites will turn off on January 18th.

Googler Pierre Far made a timely Google+ post in which he outlined some tips for webmasters who want to go dark in protest, but have SEO considerations.

Check it out below, and remember, the internet must remain free.

Website outages and blackouts the right way

tl;dr: Use a 503 HTTP status code but read on for important details.

Sometimes webmasters want to take their site offline for a day or so, perhaps for server maintenance or as political protest. We’re currently seeing some recommendations being made about how to do this that have a high chance of hurting how Google sees these websites and so we wanted to give you a quick how-to guide based on our current recommendations.

The most common scenario we’re seeing webmasters talk about implementing is to replace the contents on all or some of their pages with an error message (“site offline”) or a protest message. The following applies to this scenario (replacing the contents of your pages) and so please ask (details below) if you’re thinking of doing something else.

1. The most important point: Webmasters should return a 503 HTTP header for all the URLs participating in the blackout (parts of a site or the whole site). This helps in two ways:

a. It tells us it’s not the “real” content on the site and won’t be indexed.

b. Because of (a), even if we see the same content (e.g. the “site offline” message) on all the URLs, it won’t cause duplicate content issues.

2. Googlebot’s crawling rate will drop when it sees a spike in 503 headers. This is unavoidable but as long as the blackout is only a transient event, it shouldn’t cause any long-term problems and the crawl rate will recover fairly quickly to the pre-blackout rate. How fast depends on the site and it should be on the order of a few days.

3. Two important notes about robots.txt:

a. As Googlebot is currently configured, it will halt all crawling of the site if the site’s robots.txt file returns a 503 status code for robots.txt. This crawling block will continue until Googlebot sees an acceptable status code for robots.txt fetches (currently 200 or 404). This is a built-in safety mechanism so that Googlebot doesn’t end up crawling content it’s usually blocked from reaching. So if you’re blacking out only a portion of the site, be sure the robots.txt file’s status code is not changed to a 503.

b. Some webmasters may be tempted to change the robots.txt file to have a “Disallow: /” in an attempt to block crawling during the blackout. Don’t block Googlebot’s crawling like this as this has a high chance of causing crawling issues for much longer than the few days expected for the crawl rate recovery.

4. Webmasters will see these errors in Webmaster Tools: it will report that we saw the blackout. Be sure to monitor the Crawl Errors section particularly closely for a couple of weeks after the blackout to ensure there aren’t any unexpected lingering issues.

5. General advice: Keep it simple and don’t change too many things, especially changes that take different times to take effect. Don’t change the DNS settings. As mentioned above, don’t change the robots.txt file contents. Also, don’t alter the crawl rate setting in WMT. Keeping as many settings constant as possible before, during, and after the blackout will minimize the chances of something odd happening.

You can then head on over to webmaster central to continue the discussion.

However, if you built your website using Zeeblio, or are even planning on building a website and shopping around for tools, they’ve announced an incredibly helpful feature: a one-click function that turns your published website into a mobile-friendly version when viewed on smartphones and tablets. Beyond simply shrinking your website (since your browser pretty much does that already by default), the feature allows users to customize content you want displayed when viewed from mobile devices. And seriously, all you have to do is click on feature that says “Turn On Mobile Layout.” That’s it (unless you wanna tweak the lay-out, but that’s your bag to sort through).

Created by the folks at Tripod.com, Zeeblio’s mission is to help professionals and small business create sharp looking websites with relative ease and puts a heavy emphasis on customization. For anyone unfamiliar with their product, the video below should give you a proper introduction.

Kelly O’Hara, Product Manager of Web Publishing, explained, “The number of consumers that access the web via mobile phones continues to grow, and our customers need great-looking, mobile-friendly sites to be successful. We’re excited about this new feature because now Zeeblio is not just the easiest way to make an awesome website, it’s also the easiest way to create a fantastic mobile site, too.”

There’s really no excuse anymore for businesses to not have made their websites compatible to the already-difficult navigation of mobile browsers.

But, let’s be clear. They did not disrupt trading at the exchange nor flights on the airline. In other words, they simply crashed the cosmetic homepages of those entities.

This is somewhat akin to claiming credit for attacking a person’s home, only for it to be discovered later that you ripped the numbers off the mailbox.

Earlier this month, the group claimed they had gotten almost half a million Israeli credit card numbers. Israeli authorities said that it was more like 21,000 numbers. There is some debate as to whether those numbers were genuine.

Last week an Israeli retaliated by posting information about hundreds of Saudis, Egyptians, Syrians, etc. This hacker claimed to be a “soldier in an Israeli intelligence unit”.

If most of this sounds all too adolescent, it could well be. The release of some credit card information may have caused inconvenience, but no cardholder would be held responsible for that kind of theft. These stunts sound a lot like teens or college students trolling around for low-security sites to scrape credit card info from, if they don’t make the numbers up entirely. Then, they make forum postings filled with racist and warmongering invective.

The former head of Internet security for the Israeli government said, “Right now, we’re not seeing anything that’s especially interesting or especially dangerous.”

Still, as fun as it might be to register face.book or lexa.pro, those site pranks will cost you a cool $185,000 a pop.

That price tag might seem like a strong enough preventive measure to keep everyday buffoons from taking advantage of the names of corporations but the U.S. government is still wary of ICANN’s new offerings. Lawerence Strickling, Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information for the Department of Commerce, met with representatives from several businesses to discuss ICANN’s decision. As Bloomberg puts it, “General Electric Co. (GE), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) and Coca-Cola Co. (KO) are among more than 40 companies that have joined with the Association of National Advertisers to oppose the expansion, saying it will increase costs for companies, confuse customers and create new risks of Internet fraud.”

In a letter to ICANN citing concerns of potential cybersquatting of websites including brand names and increased confusion among consumers, ANA President Robert D. Liodice wrote:

The ANA and its membership regard the Program as not merely unsupportable, but potentially disastrous — exacting outrageous fees and costs, requiring massive diversion of resources, and instituting an application, evaluation and dispute resolution process that is certain to lead to increased contention and costly federal and international legal action with no demonstrable benefit to businesses or consumers. These concerns are especially heightened in an economy that day by day continues to pose ever-increasing challenges and unprecedented uncertainties for businesses and consumers worldwide. Another layer of unnecessary and unjustifiable costs is the last thing the selling and buying public needs in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Corporations already patrol the Internet for websites that they believe violate trademarks. Additionally, they don’t want you getting your rocks off at the expense of their namesake. Just try visiting microsoft.xxx, facebook.xxx, apple.xxx, amazon.xxx, or even twitter.xxx. All of these URLs present visitors with the same message:

And yeah, you barely even need to take one guess as to who the owners of those respective domains might be. Corporations have a steady practice of snatching up websites that they have zero intention of using solely to prevent the URLs from being used by cybersquatters and shady businesses.

ICANN acknowledged all of the above concerns and stated that they’re “going to go slow” in divvying out the new URLs to applicants. Regardless, Reuters reports that “ICANN has no plans to delay rollout of the top level domain expansion, a goal that is to allow more innovation in website addresses and to open the space to the non-Latin alphabets. It has pledged a quick take-down for trademark violators under the new system.”

All said, it seems a little presumptuous of businesses to assume that the average Internet user would be duped by a site like facebook.xxx. Besides, who’s to say that apple.xx wouldn’t be a legitimate site? Maybe there’s an untapped market out there for people with antediluvian fetishes that such a URL would perfectly satisfy? Besides, it’s not just anybody that’s going to fork over nearly $200K in order to create such a website. As Mr. Liodice mentioned above, the U.S. economy is still in crisis and people might wanna hold onto that money for more meaningful purposes.

What do you think? Is this brand protection overkill or do these corporations have a fair complaint for protecting their brand? Add your comments to the discussion below.

Broadband Choices put out the following infographic.

Sources for the data are listed at the bottom of the graphic.

via

For just $35, you can have your site permanently inked into Mr. Vaillancourt’s skin, as well as linked to from his fast-growing list of sponsors on his personal site, back2thelight.com. Major sponsors (the ones that get the large tattoos in the prime real estate seen above) have to shell out $500.

According to his site, more than half the money he raises for the project will go towards charitable organizations to help in places like Haiti and Somalia.

Those who know me will agree that I’m a spontaneous guy, a man of real conviction and passion who’s not afraid of getting involved in unconventional projects. I want to break a world record and become the man with “the most Websites tattooed on his body.” But more importantly, I want to help others. That’s why I’m going to donate more than half the money raised through the project for Haïti.

Vaillancourt already has over 15,000 URLs tattooed all over his body, and he claims that over 16,000 more have already reserved a spot. Apparently, the first 50,000 URLs will be inked traditionally, as black text. The second half will be tattooed in fluorescent ink so that he can be “very noticeable in nightclubs.”

Each 100 URLs take about an hour to tattoo, so the entire 100,000 will end up costing Vaillancourt between 10,000 and 12,000 hours of his life. The entire project will hopefully generate a total of around $3.5 million.

While “over half” the money will go to charity, the rest will go to paying old debts and helping him raise his son, he says. With almost 150,000 likes on his Facebook page, it looks like Vaillancourt is generating enough publicity to make his goal a reality.

Before the test, GetResponse offered a free trial for their service – but it wasn’t prominently displayed on their homepage. Instead it was buried deeper on the site, on other pages. Bottom line: is wasn’t a well promoted option for browsing customers. On the other hand, the “buy now” button, allowing people to directly purchase their services, did have prime real estate on the homepage.

They wanted to know what would happen if they displayed their free trial option directly beside the “buy now” option. Would it significantly decrease the number of paid accounts?

There was a perception that providing a “Free Trial” button will decrease the number of signups so it was quite a critical test. They used Visual Website Optimizer to quickly setup an A/B test in which variation had an extra “Free Trial” button next to the “Buy Now” button.

Here’s what A looked like:

And here’s what the B variation homepage looked like:

What they found was that not only did the prominent free trial button increase free account signups by 158%, it led to no significant decrease in the number of paid accounts that people were signing up for via the homepage button.

Agnieszka Dabrowska of GetResponse had this to say about the results:

It’s worth testing different variations of Call to Action (CTA) on the homepage. We expected that by adding a free trial button on the homepage the number of paid accounts would decrease. We were positively surprised by the results. Not only did we manage to keep the sale at the same level, but we also noticed a huge increase in the number of free trial accounts, which will also result in a bigger number of upgrades in the future.

Of course a case study is just that – a study of one case. There’s no guarantee that adding a “free trial” button to your homepage would produce similar results. But it does show that it’s probably worth a try.

Can you attest to the advantages and disadvantages of this? Let us know in the comments.

Various popular websites found ways to show their appreciation for Jobs – from Boing Boing to Google. Here are some of the tributes from around the internets -

First up, my favorite Jobs tribute comes from Boing Boing. They have transformed the entire layout of their site to resemble a mac desktop from way-back-when:

Google’s homepage kept it classy with a simple “Steve Jobs, 1955-2011.” It linked to apple.com:

Speaking of the apple.com homepage, they kept it super classy with this image that still graces your landing:

Reddit replaced their alien with a small Jobs sketch on their logo:

YouTube featured Steve Jobs videos on the homepage:

Search Engine Land gave us a black background with the Apple logo in the top left corner:

The Unofficial Apple Weblog honored Jobs with a large header of an inspiring quote:

Finally, Wired dedicated their entire landing page to this image of Jobs, complete with various quotes about Jobs from people like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin:

What was your favorite way that a site honored Steve Jobs today? Let us know in the comments.

Yesterday, Italian designer Missoni launched a 400-piece collection at Target. And yesterday, Target felt the full force of fashion-hungry online shoppers as their website crashed multiple times and was pretty much non-functional for most of the day.

The site didn’t become functional again until early this morning, as a Tweet from Target claims that online sales resumed sometimes around 6 am EST.

Apparently, Target knows how to create buzz for a product launch, and this time it worked a little too well. Missoni is a fashion house known for colorful, abstract patterns and the use of a variety of fabrics and materials. I’m not really in tune with the current trends in fashion at the moment, but apparently they are kind of a big deal. And Target’s Missoni collection offers the products for a fraction of the cost one would pay normally. Popularity + bargain = your online infrastructure taking quite the hit.

Both the official Target Twitter account and the Target Style account spent most of the day yesterday and part of the day today fielding tweets about the down site. All in all, the two accounts must have responded to dozens, possibly over a hundred specific complaints.

Of course, it wasn’t just the website that saw a spike in traffic. Retail stores were swamped as well, as you can see from this picture posted to a Target blog All the way up here.

One little thing about that blog. It’s billed as the blog of Marina, the spokesmodel for Missoni for Target. The thing is, Marina is a giant doll. She even has a Twitter account that says “I’m little Marina and I’m a real doll -joints hinges and all. Target and Missoni have hired me to cover their new collection.” Here’s a video clip of her in action at an undisclosed event. Trust me, it’s not creepy at all…