12.21.2011

Will SOPA hurt the Internet?

As of today, the United States legislature is currently working on putting together the Stop Online Privacy Act, a new bill intended to prevent companies from losing business by pirating downloads and software.

The bipartisan bill will make unauthorized streaming of content a felony, will bar ISP's from giving access to the sites, and bar search engines from linking to the sites. It is up to the Department of Justice, in addition to copyright holders, to deem sites blockable.

Supporters for the bill argue that the laws are a natural extension of copyright laws into the 21st century, and that the bill is necessary to prevent companies from losing too much intellectual property.

The bill's opponents say that the government will have too much say as to whether a site can remain operable, and that the security changes will undermine the basic structure of the internet.


Where do you stand on SOPA?

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/sopa-hearings-cast-debate-as-old-media-vs-new-media/2011/12/16/gIQAmCD3yO_story.html

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/109533-how-sopa-could-actually-break-the-internet

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/12/21/sopa-haters-are-already-finding-easy-ways-to-circumvent-its-censorship/

12.20.2011

Frictionless Sharing

During a recent conversation I had with Time Inc.'s social media editor, Allie Townsend, she mentioned a lot of online publications are turning their attention to frictionless sharing.

If any of you use Spotify (If you don't, I highly recommend it.), you've already experienced it firsthand. In a nutshell, whenever you listen to music using Spotify it shares the information with your Facebook profile. By encouraging users to log into their Facebook profiles while using the music streaming app, Spotify found a great way to market itself on peoples' news feeds.

More recently, many of you have probably noticed the Washington Post Social Reader cropping up on your Facebook news feeds. This too uses frictionless sharing, as everything you read will show up on your profile.

No longer do you have to actively share information because more and more applications are doing it for you. Unfortunately, you also can't control who you share with at this stage in the game.

My question to everyone is how do you think this will change the news industry, if at all?

At the very least, I feel news organizations have found a brand new way market themselves. But this could also prove a great way to disseminate news content without having to manually upload a story link to Facebook every time. The possibilities seem endless.

Also, here's a link that explains frictionless sharing and its pros and cons better than I ever could:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_trends_of_2011_frictionless_sharing.php