Two bills being voted on next week in the House of Representatives contain language that could censor the Internet in ways you would never imagine.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate are well meaning, but if passed, will be destructive to internet freedoms we’ve all come to expect as well as forces that have helped innovation on the internet flourish. Both pieces of legislation greatly weaken theDigital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which for over a decade has helped Internet companies grow and flourish.

The recording industry, movie studios and television studios are the driving forces behind these bills. We are all very aware of how the music industry ‘s slow and regressive response to digital music backfired while not helping recording artists or the music industry.

Instead of creating better ways to legally download music (as Apple did for them by creating iTunes), their solution was to sue music lovers. Imagine the repercussions of this industry, and the Hollywood studios that have not adapted to how digital innovations have affected their industry, dictating policies that regulate the Internet.

Some of the companies and organizations that have opposed these bills so far include American Express, AOL, Creative Commons, Demand Progress, Discover, eBay, Etsy, Facebook, Foursquare, Google, LinkedIn, MoveOn, Mozilla, OpenDNS, PayPal, Twitter, Visa, Wikimedia Foundation, Yahoo! and Zynga. They are joined by web founders, public interest groups, non-profits, advocacy organizations, thinktanks, industry associations, websites, online services, cybersecurity companies, engineers, international human rights advocates, entrepreneurs, founders, CEOs, executives, venture capitalists, academics, experts, educators, editorial boards and student newspapers.

Would you rather have these companies and Internet-related professionals determine what’s best for the Internet and its users? We can probably agree that they are more aware of what’s beneficial for the Internet than the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America.

Reddit has announced a blackout on January 18th to protest SOPA and Wikipedia is considering joiningthem. Thousands of people are changing their Twitter and Facebook avatars to include a Blackout SOPAbadge across their face in protest.

SOPA and PIPA aim to help private corporations shut down unauthorized websites where people download music, movies, and TV shows. Most of these websites are outside of America, so these corporations are looking to combat them in a few ways. 1) Block access to infringing domain names. 2) Sue U.S. based search engines, blogs, websites, directories and forums to remove links to these sites. 3) Stop funding these websites by not allowing advertisers to support them.

The consequences that SOPA and PIPA supporters do not mention include: 1) This will not stop downloaders. History has proven this. 2) It will cripple startups by allowing corporations to sue any company they decide is not filtering to their subjective satisfaction. One of these lawsuits can easily bankrupt new websites and search engines that offer competitive alternatives to their corporate brethren. 3) The ambiguous language in PIPA and SOPA leaves plenty of room for misinterpretation that can make websites pioneering new avenues look like pirates. In the past, this could have affected sites like YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Facebook and hundreds of other social sites where people express themselves, organize protests, share news or make art.

The bottom line and main question to ask yourself is, “Do I trust the U.S. government to censor the Internet and protect free expression of its people? And if I do, do I trust other governments who will probably follow suit?” The next question to ask yourself is, “Is it worth the potential of creating a censored internet that is less innovative and stable in order to possibly help the RIAA and MPAA sell more music and movies?”

I strongly recommend contacting your Senators and Congressional Representatives or visiting American Censorship to make your voice heard on these critical bills that can negatively impact the Internet that you use every day. If online activists could make GoDaddy flip its support on SOPA and PIPA, then it can happen with Congress too.

This article was originally posted in Huffington Post

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, just approved extending top-level domain names. Currently, there are 22 general top-level domains and, with this historical vote, that number will now increase to as many as our imaginations can create.

What this means is that for the first time ever you can have a website address that ends in any word you like instead of .com, .net, .org, etc. That is, as long as you can pay approximately $185,000 initially and then $75,000 annually for the privilege.

For the corporations and individuals able to leap this hurdle it sounds like a great idea. Ford can buy (dot) .ford or .car or .truck (if they’re faster than Toyota in filing for the domain registrations). In theory, the availability of these new URL endings means that you’ll type in ‘Ford.car’ instead of ‘Ford.com’… or will you?

It will take a lot of retraining to get Americans to type in anything besides dot com in a web browser when they want to visit a website. Cognitive bias already has us trained to go to ‘.com’ first, ‘.net’ second and ‘.org’ or ‘.edu’ third — with other domain name endings falling short of hitting our cognitive radar.

When is the last time you visited a website (besides bit.ly for URL shortening or Like.fm or blip.fm for music) that did not end in one of those top three domain endings? My guess is that you’ve maybe visited one site in the last month, but most likely you haven’t even visited one — unless you ended up there unitentionally. In fact, when is the last time you automatically typed in ‘.net’ for a web address (besides Comcast.net — which still took a long time for people to recognize) first?

For better or worse, any domain ending besides ‘.com’ in relation to ‘.com’ is like any toll-free number besides ’800′ in relation to ’800.’ Our brains are now trained to dial 800 for a toll-free call and to enter ‘.com’ after a business name we’re looking for online.

The good news is that if you don’t have a spare $185,000 lying around to purchase a top-level domain, fear not my friend. Your $7-a-year .com domain will continue to serve your business well. What’s more, the Coca Cola Company will still have to own coke.com and coca-cola.com as well as coke.soda or drink.coke.

This article was originally published in the Huffington Post.

Yesterday the Federal Trade Commission took the first steps towards creating a Do Not Track feature to allow internet users to opt-out of having companies obtain data on their online surfing habits. This mechanism is being designed in the spirit of the Do Not Call registry that regulates the activities of telemarketers.

On the surface this sounds great. You would be hard pressed to find anyone, besides a telemarketer, who preferred life before the Do Not Call list eliminated those annoying sales calls that interrupted your dinner. But online advertising and telemarketing are very different animals, so let’s look a little deeper into what the reality of a Do Not Track bill would look like.

In theory implementing a Do Not track mechanism will allow consumers to have more control over their personal information that is shared online. Internet privacy has been a hot topic for awhile now, so it’s easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to supporting anything that will protect online privacy. The more prudent way to analyze the implications of a Do Not Track bill is to look at what it will actually accomplish.

Eliminating or decreasing the frequency of internet users receiving targeted advertising while they surf websites is the result that the Do Not Track bill. Building individual profiles of how we search, surf and interact online for the use of targeted advertising, based on behavioral targeting and contextual advertising, is assumed to be a problem that needs solving. …but is it?

Common wisdom tells us that people hate advertising. Is this true, or is this is a myth when it is thrown out as a blanket statement?

People don’t hate advertising; they hate advertising for stuff they don’t want.

People love advertising that tells them about a new cool product they will use. We are psychologically wired to connect with other people and seek their validation. Therefore we love to be the first one to tell our friends about something that we think is cool, and that we think they will think is cool.

Click here to view the embedded video.

With this in mind, why wouldn’t you want to see targeted advertising when you’re online? You’re going to see advertising anyway, so what’s bad about it being for products and services that are aligned with your historical online profile of interests?

Why should anyone be afraid of marketers using this data to offer you more things that you want? This isn’t the same as someone using your private information for identity theft. This is a way for you to find out about things you’ll probably be interested in rather than finding out about things you don’t care about.

The word ‘privacy’ is a trigger word. No one wants to give up their privacy. If the Do Not Track bill goes into effect you can choose to keep a little bit of your privacy in exchange for continuing to receive nonspecific advertising instead of targeted advertising online.

Either way, this issue is not anywhere near the problem it’s made out to be and your life as an American consumer will continue on. You just may have to wait longer to discover cool new products and be stuck with seeing diaper advertisements when you don’t have any toddlers or ads for singles websites even though you’ve been married for 10 years.

This article was originally posted in the Huffington Post.

A friend sent this to me on Facebook and it struck me.  We talk about how things have changed so much in our lifetimes, but we usually reference things like 8 track tapes and vinyl records switching to compact discs and bytes on an iPod. Did you realize that the patent for the compact disc was filed in 1966 and the first one wasn’t produced until 1982?

But think about how much your life has changed just in the last 10 years from advances in technology.  Can you remember life before you had an email address or a cell phone?  This video is from a newscast in 1981, almost 20 years ago.  Look how how far we’ve come with the advancement of Moore’s Law.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What made watching this even funnier to me was that I saw my friend’s email on my iPad and clicked a link to go to Facebook to read the message.  Then I clicked into YouTube and watched this on a thin crisp iPad screen.  That’s normal today.  ‘Normal’ when this was broadcast was to move the rabbit ears on a TV the size of a bank safe to get good reception and cable TV was a new phenomenon.

Jesse Thomas’ video on the State of the Internet shows the amazing amount of users on the internet and how we’re using it. We’ve come a long way from 1995 when Newsweek declared that the internet would fail.

My takeaway from this is that it’s a great reflection of how connecting online has become a basic daily activity.  Beyond that,  the ways in which we can better connect to larger numbers of people in various ways continues to grow at an astronomical rate.  What’s your takeaway from watching this?

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’ve seen other videos on what’s happening with augmented reality, a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmented by) virtual computer-generated imagery – creating a mixed reality.

But after seeing this video in a great post by Jeremiah Owyang, I had to pass it on.  Besides, the video was shot on the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, highlighting part of what I love about living here.

Other videos I’ve seen show pointing an iPhone at a neighborhood, seeing which houses are for sale, the sale prices and then watching video tours of the houses you like.  Brightkite has a new Layar app for phones using Android and for iPhone 3GS phones.

Eventually you’ll probably be able to scan any environment and as people walk by you’ll see their bios, social networks and other information identifying them. It’s a little spooky, but I’m guessing that there will be ways to choose whether or if you’re information will be accessible.  The future is now.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We have definitely hit the age of participatory media.  Old mass media is very sick and broadcast methods of interruption marketing have gone from annoying to impotent, but I don’t agree with the idea that mass media will die.  It will be re-engineered like all industries must in this time of change.

According to the loud mouths in the media, the birth of TV was supposed to kill radio.  Then cable TV was supposed to kill standard TV.  Then VCR home recording was supposed to kill visits to movie theaters.  Now the internet and video games are supposed to kill TV.  It’s just more ‘look, the sky is falling’ hoo-hah.  (And any opportunity to use the word ‘hoo-hah’ is one I’ll take because it’s fun to say.)

Even newspapers will never die.  The industries of the past are crumbling and newspaper subscriptions will continue declining, but they’ll always be around in some fashion.

That said, the era of participatory media is in full force.  It was a babe when blogs and YouTube hit the scene, but  now it’s how young people get most of their news.

As generation Y is poised to dominate the population in a few years, all communication and business marketing methods are shifting to two-way or multi-channel platforms like blogs and Twitter.  Gone are the days where advertisers could win the day by shouting unwanted messages to an unsuspecting public or when you had to wait until TV told you what was happening in your world.

I’s all about community, transparency, trust agents, authenticity and tribes.  Although, for now the signal to noise ratio is still way off as old school people and companies still try to use new multi-channel platforms to broadcast obnoxious marketing messages no one wants without being genuine contributors to conversations people are looking to have.  If they aren’t helping, they’re hurting.  But they’ll learn, or they’ll die.

On another note, you probably remember the famous “Wassup” superbowl commercial in 2000.  What you may not know is that is was originally a short film done by a college student and then Budweiser hired him to remake it into a commercial with beer.

Watch the original ad below and the follow up to it in 2008 with the same actors.  Note how this user generated content (UGC) powerfully conveys information about how the world changed in eight years.  Then think about how much information you’ve learned in the last week or month from UGC videos, blog posts, Twitter tweets and other sources.  It’s a brave new world.

Click here to view the embedded video.