A truly great summary of the SOPA issue from CopyBlogger.

C|Net’s SOPA FAQ

Inc. Magazine’s Stand on SOPA.

Why is the bill so bad? You can read how the SOPA Bill violates the Constitution by creating blacklists and opposing free speech. Since the bill also allows sites to be shut down without an adversary proceeding (a court or administrative hearing) it effectively allows anything to be shut down first, with questions asked later (if the party can afford it.)

From a small business perspective,  a company could have their site on a server that is a “shared” server. If one of the other tennets has an infringing site, the entire server could be shut down, and you’d be collateral damage. I can’t support that in any case.

By creating this bill, our government would have the power we criticize in the “Great Firewall of China” and other oppressive regimes. Hey, remember when Pakistan blocked Youtube and YouTube became unreachable for almost all of the Internet? (The link documents that happened in 2008. Whoops, we just took down your company. Sorry.) That is the kind of thing we’re talking about here – and new measures are being created so governments and groups can’t do this intentionally or by accident. If this kind of power is legislated, it will leave technical holes in the Internet where all sorts of abuse can happen. Don’t take it from me, read the “father of the Internet” Vint Cerf’s position on SOPA.

I mean, if the right-wing Heritage Foundation can oppose SOPA at the same time the lefty EFF opposes SOPA, there is something seriously wrong with the bill.

Even though GoDaddy allegedly no longer supports SOPA, their support before they chose to change is enough to make me question working with this company going forward. That, and the fact they use women as sex objects to sell their services. As a father of a daughter, I’m voting with my feet and my wallet against this practice. I will be doing more as soon as I make sure I know where all the DNS entries go so I don’t mess up this blog, my email and other business-critical things. There are a bunch of different registrars who will take your business, and Lifehacker has a great piece on ditching GoDaddy.

So, goodbye GoDaddy. I’ve just started to transfer away 17 domains, more are coming.

SOPA and the Senate’s equivalent are bad laws.  I’ll stress again that I’m for businesses being able to protect their intellectual property, as long as they find methods that don’t break the Internet in doing this.

The event will be live streamed on Monday around 10:15 AM Eastern, and you can submit questions and comments from the comfort of your keyboard. I’ll provide the email address for submissions soon.

Please check it out, as there’s a contest and a few people will win printers! Free Printers! (Please read the rules).

*This is a sponsored conversation – I am compensated for my time and expertise.

As a board member of Social Media Club, and of the original team behind the group, we always envisioned being able to bring together professionals form important discussions. This is part of what we are chartered to do – “2. Share lessons among practitioners.” At the Social Media Clubhouse, we’ll have summits on Co-Working, Engagement, and the Synaptic Web.

I hope you’ll follow us via our #smch3 hashtag, our Twitter list (forthcoming) and our site. And, if you’ll be Austin, please get in touch – I’d love to meet or catch up with you.

If you haven’t seen Drew Olanoff and Drew Carey on CNN, – watch it now.

If you don’t have time to watch, here’s the short version:

• Go to Twitter.
• Follow DrewFromTV – Drew Carey of The Price Is Right, Whose Line is it Anyway, The Drew Carey Show, etc.
• Drew Carey will donate $1 because you followed him. Ultimately he’s promised LiveStrong Foundation up to 1 Million Dollars – $1 for each Twitter Follower.

Just follow the guy, help reach a $1 Million donation. More info at http://www.milliondollardrew.com . If you don’t even have a Twitter account, this is a reason to get one.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Drew Carey Bids $100K For Twitter Name (huffingtonpost.com)
• Make Drew Carey give away $1 million (cnn.com)
• Help Drew Olanoff Raise $1 Million Dollars for Cancer Research (pulverblog.pulver.com)

I mentioned this at a conference, and I’m not sure I ever codified it properly. So, who is a friend?

According to Wikipedia, “Friendship is co-operative and supportive behavior between two or more people. In this sense, the term connotes a relationship which involves mutual knowledge, esteem, and affection and respect along with a degree of rendering service to friends in times of need or crisis.”

In Social Networks, a friend is someone who is willing to click “add this person” in a dialog box. We have very few ways of distinguishing other people’s true friends – the ones who share mutual affection or who would give service in a crisis – from their long time college acquaintances, neighborhood well wishers, elementary school reminiscences, and stalker ex-girlfriends. One early social network, Orkut from Google, actually allowed you to indicate how close you were to a person from “never met” to “best friend.” Today’s Facebook allows you to put friends into lists so you can ignore the ones you connected with but don’t really know, but that’s not the same thing.

The network that is most lacking in a way to distinguish levels of connection is LinkedIn. Since much of the intention behind the network is business networking and creating connections between friends, people often ask for referals to others. When you look for a way to make a connection to Bill, you may see that you’re connected by “John, Jane and 12 others.” Wouldn’t it be best if you were able to request the connection through John, who you know as well as 8 on a scale of 1-10 and who knows Bill as a 9 on the same scale? Instead you may ask Jane, who you also know as an 8, but who only knows Bill as a 2 – yet you may have no way of knowing this. This could lead to Jane awkwardly declining to make the connection, or having her request ignored.

I believe that as social networking services evolve, we’ll have more choices in how we distinguish our degrees of relationships, and how we expose that data to others. A project like the “Friend of a Friend Project” is doing so, and others such as Yahoo are attempting to start to use that data. Let’s hope we can somehow come up with words as descriptive as icy, powdery, slushy and packed to let us distinguish between our BFFs and our FOAFs.

How To Boost Your Social Media Productivity – A Guide For Busy People

In this post, we’ve put together a comprehensive list of articles with great advice, tips and tools to help you be more productive and efficient when using social media. We also have some posts that offer up general online productivity insights.

And, don’t forget to read the comments on the post – a few people have given their own suggestions. 

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the media business is being turned upside down by our new freedoms and our new roles. We’re not just readers anymore, or listeners or viewers. We’re not customers and we’re certainly not consumers. We’re users. We don’t consume content, we use it, and mostly what we use it for is to support our conversations with one another, because we’re media outlets now too. When I am talking about some event that just happened, whether it’s an earthquake or a basketball game, whether the conversation is in email or Facebook or Twitter, I want to link to what I’m talking about, and I want my friends to be able to read it easily, and to share it with their friends.

This is where my reality lies. I seem to get a huge volume of information daily, but the best information comes from my friends (and by friends, I mean both those who I really know and spend time with, and those who are in name-only on social networks).

Clay names this ‘superdistribution’ – the sharing of content from friend to friend. I’m more likely to learn about breaking news from @breakingnewson on Twitter or someone re-tweeting that than I am by reading NYTimes.com these days. And that, in a nutshell, is a big problem for the Times. It is not un-solvable. And I do believe people at NYT are thinking about it. It will be interesting to see how quickly that translates to action.

It is a bit of a bold strategy, calling on all of us to promote his conference in the context of helping a charity at the same time. I’m not sure I love the strategy, actually, but it is bold and it has the potential to be a new model:

• Paying for mailing lists =”tired”
• Paying a charity in exchange for people’s attention = “wired?”  (Or even Causewired?)

Lee’s article is below – go read it, sign up (and tell them where you found out about it, eh?).

Social Media: Can it Raise Just 5000.00 Dollars to Help 5 Year Olds? – Emerging Communications Blog

Let’s have a public test of the effectiveness of social media. Let’s do it with the aim of measuring the reach and usage of social media (and hopefully with some serendipity regarding the results). Let’s do it in a way that helps us understand the role and significance of social media on the emerging communications landscape.