Tomorrow, many sites are taking a stand against proposed legislation in the United States — the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate. On Wednesday, January 18th, sites like Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, and even the entire ICanHasCheezburger Network will protest these proposals in some way. Many of them, like Wikipedia, will be “blacking out” their site — effectively removing their content from the internet for the duration.
Taking down a website is no light matter. No matter how important the cause, many sites are a source of income and the return to business after a protest blackout should be considered.

Pierre Far (Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google UK) has posted a good bit of information on how to temporarily remove your site from the internet while keeping the consequences in check.

Other methods

An alternative to this is an interstitial blackout, that still allows the site to be accessed, but only after the user sees a blackout message.

There is a handy SOPA Blackout JavaScript Utility for sites that wish to go this route — no content is then pulled from the site, but awareness is still created. There are also plugins for WordPress, Drupal, and others.

No matter your method, please consider the future of the internet, and help keep it open for all.

Many of us have gadgets, and let’s face it, a good portion of them start from the “oooh, shiny!” stage, and never progress into something terribly useful. Like apps, those gadgets get tried, tired, and, eventually, retired.

But although the iPad may have started out with that dubious future in the minds of many, it looks like it’s making good headway, leaving the couch and the coffee house, and becoming a business tool — or at least, that’s the way many of us would like to have it.

To help make your business iPad more effective in meetings, look no further than Amber MacArthur. As usual, she makes technology relevant and useful in this quick article covering business meetings and iPads (and other mobile tech devices, by extension). She doesn’t beat us over the head with it, but I like that one of those five is “Be Courteous” — always something to keep in mind at any meeting.

Read the full article on Fast Company: 5 Tips That Make Your Meetings iPad-Friendly.

Now don’t think for a second that correlation has anything to do with causality, but it does give you pause for thought, hmm?

BBC News – Internet Explorer users have lower IQ says study.