The only two articles you’ll be able to read on Wikipedia today describe the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House. The rest are unavailable due to a widespread blackout on the Internet. You might have noticed Google’s logo expressing their support, shown below. Google didn’t go as far as to shut the search engine down, which may very well put the Earth off its axis at this point, but they do have a SOPA/PIPA petition you can sign.

If you’re unfamiliar with this new legislation under review, it’s worth knowing about. The short version is that it has the potential to violate the First Amendment, censor and cripple the Internet, impose harmful regulations on American business and threaten whistle-blowing and other free speech actions. It is thoroughly documented, so I will point you to TechCrunch’s SOPA coverage for the latest.

Fellow tech entrepreneur Ben Huh, CEO of Cheezburger, has been fighting this battle for months. Go Ben! People took notice when Ben threatened to move his 1,000+ domain names away from GoDaddy if they continued to support the bill. Today, if you try to pull up one of his websites, FAIL Blog, you’ll see the following message before entering the site:

Ben is not alone. While Facebook hasn’t officially joined the ranks, Zuckerberg has. I haven’t been extremely vocal about this for various reasons, but not because I support the bills. I generally feel that ridiculous measures like this written by people who don’t truly understand the consequences will blow over in time. But that doesn’t just happen by accident. It happens thanks to thousands or millions of people who make a stand.

And it’s always a useful reminder of the power lawmakers have, and the attention we must pay to our own power to help them craft policies that positively influence our lives. Someone once told me that technology moves much faster than the law, and this is one of those points of conflict that can emerge.

If you want to help and have about 10 seconds, this SOPA/PIPA petition from Avaaz.org is a good place to start.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Technology, Web

Wikipedia Blackout Page

While browsing the Web today you’re probably seeing the response to the Stop Online Piracy Act that has been introduced into the U.S. Congress.  Many major web companies feel that this legislation will have a negative effect on the way the Internet/Web works and some of them (including Google, YouTube and Wikipedia) are taking down, altering, or limiting their websites to raise awareness of the bill.

Most of Wikipedia is down entirely today but you can still read the description of the legislation here.

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Tom Hickey Categories: Technology, Web

Or, at least all of the electrons that form the cat videos and pornography zipping around it?

Impossible to calculate exactly but, like most bizarre science facts (the planet Saturn could float on water since it’s only 2/3 as dense, the national debt as a stack of pennies would stretch out of the solar system, etc.) this is entertaining because of the scales involved.

The guys who put this together are called VSauce and their YouTube channel has a lot of other interesting time-waster material.

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Tom Hickey Categories: Fun, General, Technology, Web

Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson in 1972

The death of Steve Jobs has been discussed and his life memorialized over the last couple weeks, and for good reason.  Jobs was one of those rare celebrities that the computer industry produces.  He was a very public face for a very celebrated line of products and an evangelist for a way of thinking about how we, as a culture, use technology and integrate it into our lives.

Another computer legend died recently and, while his name recognition is no where near Jobs’s, without his work the current computer world might look very different, especially Apple products.

Dennis Ritchie (September 9, 1941 – October 12, 2011) created both the C programming language and (as one of many engineers) the UNIX operating system, both while employed at AT&T Bell Labs in the late 60′s and early 70′s.

The C Programming Language

Computers are only capable of carrying out a very specific number of simple instructions; they achieve complex tasks by stringing many (MANY) of these simple instructions together. This “machine code” can be complicated for humans to work with directly, especially on a large scale project, and so most computer programs are written in a “programming language” that translates ( or “compiles”) a human-friendly set of instructions into a computer-friendly set of instructions.  Roughly speaking: the friendlier a computer language is to humans, the “higher-level” it is.  The friendlier a language is to computers, the “lower-level” it is.

With C Ritchie created a bridge between the high and low-level. An elegant, structured language easy for humans to speak that translated very fluently to machine language.  It was also very easy to create versions of C for different types of computers.

C has been so successful it has inspired or evolved into many other languages including C++ (its immediate successor), JavaScript (running in your web browser), Java (used in everything from cars, home appliances and ground-control for space missions), ActionScript (the language that makes Flash animations do clever things), and PHP (which runs this WordPress blog).  Of the top ten most popular programming languages in 2011 at least seven of them are descended from C (or are, in fact, C itself.)

The UNIX Operating System

It’s hard to over-estimate the importance of the UNIX operating system.  There are a lot of reasons that it’s become such a workhorse of the information age.  Bell Labs distributed UNIX for free to universities, which meant an entire generation of computer professionals became deeply familiar with it and brought it out into the industry.  Being written in C meant it was easy to port to new hardware.  It standardized a very reliable system of allowing multiple users to access the computer and run programs at the same time.  And, at the same time UNIX was being birthed, an agency of the U.S. Defense Department was beginning to develop the technology that would eventually evolve into the present-day Internet, and a version of UNIX called BSD (“Berkley Software Distribution,” one of those branches of UNIX that evolved from the free university distributions) ran most of it.

And finally: when Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985, he almost immediately began putting together plans for what would become the NeXT computer which was unveiled in 1988.  NeXT’s operating system was called NeXTSTEP and it was based in large part on that same BSD UNIX operating system.  Returning to Apple in 1997 he brought NeXTSTEP with him and it eventually evolved into what is now OSX.

Any OSX user who opens the “Terminal” window is essentially opening a window onto a UNIX command line that any computer science major in 1975 would feel right at home with.

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Tom Hickey Categories: General, Technology, Web

Astek uses the testing platform Litmus to make sure that the HTML formatted emails we send out for our clients look great in all email clients from Outlook to Hotmail. They have a company blog with some valuable articles on email and browser trends. This month they have shared some very interesting infographs on mobile trends and best practices.

Check them both out:

Where Are Subscribers Opening Email

Anatomy of a Perfect Mobile Email

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Katie Hawkey Categories: General, Marketing, Web

In June 2009 Microsoft rolled out Bing, the newest, freshly branded version of their search services.  I’ve used it a few times and found it a capable tool with a nice presentation but saw no reason to switch from Google.  Just saw an interesting article from CNNMoney provides some interesting statistics about where Bing stands at two years old.

One fun fact is that while Bing’s market share has risen from 8.4% at the time of its launch to 14.7% currently, almost none of that increase has come at the expense of market-leader Google (now with 64.8%).  It’s mainly been siphoned away from third-place Yahoo which (in case you didn’t know) has actually been powered by Bing since late 2009.  As the article puts it:

“There’s usually no such thing as ‘bad’ market share growth, but… That means more than half of Microsoft’s share growth has come from cannibalizing its search partner.”

The most attention-grabbing numbers though are Microsoft’s losses on Bing: $5.5 billion since launch.  The entire online services division at Microsoft, since 2007, has lost $9 billion.

Microsoft (and some analysts) believe that Bing will start turning a profit in a few years and, more importantly, evolve into a truly unique product through the addition of natural language searches and other features.  But when you’re losing a billion dollars a quarter that’s definitely the sort of bet that only a giant like Microsoft can take.

The day I hear someone say, in absolute seriousness, “I binged the address of the hotel,” I’ll admit that they’ve made real progress.

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Tom Hickey Categories: Bing, General, google, Web

Have you ever painted a room to find that the color looks dated just a few months later? Or have you ever tried to put together a spring look, something fresh and bursting with color and just a twist of sophistication, but when you put all your pieces and accessories together you looked like a kid’s carnival ride instead?

I LOVE color, but I’m not always awesome at pulling together a pallet that evokes the response I’m looking for. I’ve been so daunted by the need to pick color before, that I’ve abandoned projects (and outfits) over it. This is why I am SO excited to find Colourlovers.com (Note: that’s colour with the British “o-u-r“ spelling).

In this online community, people with a real passion and talent for color put together hundreds of pallets and patterns for you to browse through and give them fun names like ”Valiant“ or ”Viking Invasion“ or ”Lovers Cry at Movies“. They even have a Business section that is specifically colors that are trending in the corporate world.

They also take images of objects from trending websites and pull color pallets right from the images.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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I definitely would encourage you to check it out! It’s very inspirational!

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Katie Hawkey Categories: How To, Marketing, Web

I have never been able to get into Digg or any of the other sharable interest-tracking type tools. This weekend I heard Pinterest mentioned to me at least 8 times so I figured I finally needed to check it out. What a FANTASTIC tool!

Pinterest is a service that allows you to create online “Pinboards” for things you are interested in. Looking for new curtains for your living room? Create a “Living Room Curtains” pinboard and each time you find one you like, “Pin it” from an easy button you can drag and drop into your browser tool bar. Afterwards you can go back to your board to view everything you pinned, make your final choice and follow the photo back to the original page.

When you create an account you can easily find your Facebook and/or Twitter friends and identify categories of stuff you are interested in (DIY/Crafts, Home Decor, Photography, etc.) and you will see the pins from prominent pinners in these categories.

This is a very easy site to use. I suggest you request an invite today! You will be glad you did!

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Fun, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

They’re called The Tea Party, and have nothing to do with the recent movement in American politics.  Having been around for over 20 years, they are a little dismayed at the constant confusion their name now causes.  However, there is one bright spot for the now unfortunately named band.  They own the domain name teaparty.com.

And they are considering selling that domain, especially since it is valued at around 1 million US dollars.  It’s hard to let that kind of money go, even if your politics don’t jive with who’s giving you the money.  As is apparently the case with The Tea Party.  They say that the option to sell it to the highest bidder is definitely on the table, but that they’re holding off until after their upcoming world tour.  If they pull in enough money there, the band says they would accept less than $1 million, from someone like John Stewart or Stephen Colbert.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Fun, Web

Not all of your online interactions with your customers happen on your website. Emails, social media, mobile – there are a plethora of ways you connect and more being invented all the time. Luckily, there are a wide range of analytics tools out there that make tracking

! Today, I’m going to cover two of these tools: one that is quick, easy and free and one that is full featured at a reasonable cost.

Bitly
Bitly is a URL shortener tool that also shows you excellent analytics about how your link is used. You can get a LOT of information from this awesome, free tool.

Let’s say you are having a sale or special on your website and you want to distribute a link via a regular email and on Facebook and on Twitter. But if you just start sending people to your homepage, you won’t know if they are coming because they were going to come anyway or because they saw you promoting your sale. Create a Bitly link using their URL shortener and always use the Bitly link when talking about your sale. Then after the sale is finished, you can log into Bitly and see how effective your promotions were!

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Using the Referrers Detail, you can see who came in from each website or social media platform you distributed the link on. The “direct” refers would be ones that came from emails. You can also see when people were clicking and where the people who clicked are located.

Bitly also plays nice with analytics platforms such as Google Analytics, Omniture, and Webtrends, as well as social media management platforms such as…

Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a full bodied social media management tool with excellent built-in analytics that allow you to view your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Gowalla and Google Analytics from one, beautiful interface. They also offer additional social media management tools like integrated feeds from multiple accounts, smart search to find new customers, contact management to track communication history, and a powerful scheduler tool. Accounts start as low as $9/mo.

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Marketing, Social Media, Web