PIPA and SOPA Threaten Harmful Regulations on Online American Businesses

There are currently two bills that sit before Congress that would censor the Web and cripple sites and businesses accused of piracy, without even proving that those websites are meaningfully doing so. It threatens the free flow of information and the potential for innovation online.

What are SOPA and PIPA?

Wikipedia's "Dark Wednesday" Message

Essentially, they are new ways to give copyright holders the ability to go after companies that host pirated content. Once accused, the site would be blocked from anyone within the U.S. to access them and all search engines would be required to delete links to the accused sites. Also, it requires advertisers and payment services (such as Google Adwords, Adsense, etc.) to withdraw their business with the accused site. This would literally mean that site would no longer exist, and it's days of business would be done for good.

Online giants such as Google, Twitter and Reddit have all publicly opposed the bills by "going black" today. Wikipedia has even gone completely dark by taking down the site and replacing it with a message stating, "Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge," with more information regarding PIPA and SOPA and the reasons they oppose the legislation.

Millions of Internet users and entrepreneurs already oppose the two bills, but we need everyone's help in opposing it by signing a petition created by Google.

Click here to oppose the bills and sign the petition!

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When to Tweet

I read a great article about when to tweet by Andrew Phelps who was basically reaping a presentation from Dan Zarrella so for those of you with  a short attention span like me here is my summary of Andrew's article that summarizes Dan's presentation.

When and how often to tweet - A few key takeaways:

• If your goal is more followers Tweet More: Twitter’s A-listers — those with the most followers — tweet an average of 22 times a day
• If your goal is more visitors to your site tweet less - accounts that share two or more links an hour show a dramatically lower clickthrough rate than those who share no more than one
• The trick is to reach people when the noise of the crowd has died down. - That time is the afternoon when news sites are slower and on the weekend
• Retweet activity is highest late in the work day, between 2 and 5 p.m.
• Check out TweetWhen to find out what time of day is the best time to tweet for you. Turns out my prime time is Thursdays at 10PM- I guess I have some late night followers @jonballard
• It's ok to tweet the same links two or three times a day- change up the verbiage and let it rip.

Here are Dan's Power Point Slides: The Science of Timing

 

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