The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) has divided the Internet more deeply than any other issue to date and could be voted into law later this month when Congress reconvenes for its second session.

The bill, introduced by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) last October, “expands the ability of U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods”. Specifically, it targets what Hollywood calls “rogue sites” which display, host, link to or sell material protected under United States copyright law. HOWEVER, SOPA MAY BE LESS A LASER BEAM FOCUSED ON A PARTICULAR TARGET AND MORE A CANNONBALL SET TO DESTROY THE INTERNET.

Though the bill claims to target criminals who profit from the theft of copyrighted material (either through ads on a streaming site or selling DVDs of past Super Bowls), the language of the bill is so broad that the cold eye of Justice could be leveled against almost anyone who is alleged to have infringed on a copyright. Internet service providers will be obligated to shut down websites that offend the broad rubric of “criminal offences”. Offenders in other countries will be captured and put on trial in America.

The message is clear: “If you copy or steal American intellectual property, we will get you.”

If all this was done in the name of protecting the copyright and intellectual property of creatives, it’s likely there would be no hubbub. The problem is that SOPA opens the door to rampant and unchecked Internet blacklisting. Offenders could be people who use a song in a YouTube video without permission from the artist (read: 90% of YouTube), millions of Tumblr posts displaying photos and artwork without citing the artist. It’s important to protect one’s work, but prosecuting teens for posting a photo of Johnny Depp they did not purchase from the photographer is an unreasonable measure.

Copywriters across the board will also come into the line of fire, which poses a threat to a large sector of online business. Affiliate marketers, guest posters and those in email marketing could inadvertently link to or post material not compliant with SOPA and bring themselves or their employers to court or to the top of a blacklist. Politico reports that some bloggers believe SOPA will drive them to extinction.

The conservative and liberal blogospheres are unifying behind opposition to Congress’s Stop Online Piracy Act, with right-leaning bloggers arguing their very existence could be wiped out if the anti-piracy bill passes.

“If either the U.S. Senate’s Protect IP Act (PIPA) & the U.S. House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) become law, political blogs such as Red Mass Group [conservative] & Blue Mass Group [liberal] will cease to exist,” wrote a blogger at Red Mass Group.

Some have asserted that the controversial measures would criminalize pages and blogs that link to foreign websites dedicated to online piracy. In particular, this has concerned search engines like Google, which could face massive liability if some form of the bill passes, some say.

The Internet has always been a laissez-faire environment. Even today, in its sophisticated but still-evolving form, there is something a little bit wild about the Internet. A promise of being able to do or find anything is liberating and sometimes sinister, but is always there and should remain. Piracy on the Internet is a smoldering problem, but SOPA is a bucket of cold gasoline being mistaken for water.

image:ayadi

This research has been conducted on UK and US audiences and it compares the various sources like email marketing, social networks (Facebook, Twitter), Phone marketing, Live chats etc.

Few of the interesting factors released by eConsultancy are:

• 38% of consumers are not using Social Networking sites
• 61% of consumers are using search engines to research the product before taking a buy decision
• 75% of social network users are young people
• Electronics and computer related products are most researched online
• 36% of consumers are triggered to buy products via Email

Their statistics shows the following data, How consumers are triggered to buy products ? (basically, the medium of advertising products to customers).

• 42% of people are buying via Email Notifications
• 33% of people are buying through telephones
• 17% of people are using online chats
• 3% on Facebook
• 1% on Twitter

Where To Download This Report ?

If you want the full report, it costs $249 but there are free samples available from the below links:

• SAMPLE: How We Shop UK: Habits and motivations of consumers
• SAMPLE: How We Shop USA: Habits and motivations of consumers
• Here is the original statistics released by Econsultancy.

image: billaday

The advantage, your video will appear on the Search results of Google. A video sitemap contains the following information:

• Title for Video
• Description of video and its content
• URL where the user watches the original video
• A thumbnail (small image) of the video which will be shown in the results page.

So whenever you add new videos to your site, it will be taken by Google referred through the video sitemaps as quick as possible.

• Whenever a user, clicks on thumbnail shown in the Googles result page, it actually takes them to the specified URL and plays the original video.

The below video was released recently by Google on their webmaster blog (see the original post on video sitemaps).

A help page on Creating Video Sitemap is also available.

The advantage is that, entrepreneur.com has huge audience and they have the popular Entrepreneur Magazine which has millions of readers i believe. So this creates you an opportunity to show your business strengths to the world. It actually promotes your business and your products to the world. Here is the Enroll Form to join this Contest.

Good Luck.

The interesting feature provided by Twitter is that you could send and receive Tweets from your mobile phones. Tweets are by SMS. So if you want to send a tweet then you have to send an SMS formatted based on the Twitter Text Commands.

In general, Twitter works with the mobile service provider to enable this feature. Check this Twitter Mobile support page to know the list of supported countries and the list of supported service providers. Whenever you are away from your PC, you could send tweets through mobile phones. SMS Charges are applicable as per the rates fixed by your provider and no charge for receiving tweets.

To frankly say, today only i came to know this feature from Twitter’s blog. So i am adding few more points in this post on how to better utilize Twitters SMS feature for your business.

(only for those who care about their MOBILE BILL…)

• First of all, for every tweet you send, it will be charged per SMS rate. So if you have free SMS’s available then you use this feature.

• Use SMS tweeting only in case of urgency. Say for example, if one of your customer needs your reply immediately then use it. Try to avoid using SMS tweeting feature as much as possible to reduce the extra cost to your mobile bill.

• Use SMS tweeting feature to post a single question. For example, on a day you may want to just ask a question to your followers then you could use this feature. You will get all the replies to your mobile (no charge for incoming tweets) to read. On that case, you don’t need to reply them.

Also, learn the Twitter Text Commands here or just take a print out for instant future reference !  Here is the news from Twitter.

Also, if you don’t know how to configure Twitter to use with your mobile phone then check out this helpful video.