“Today Wikipedians from around the world have spoken about their opposition to this destructive legislation," said Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. "This is an extraordinary action for our community to take - and while we regret having to prevent the world from having access to Wikipedia for even a second, we simply cannot ignore the fact that SOPA and PIPA endanger free speech both in the United States and abroad, and set a frightening precedent of Internet censorship for the world."

Before deciding to join other websites and blogs in protest against the proposed legislation in the United States - the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives and Protectip (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate, over 1800 Wikipedians from around the world did discuss possible community actions. “The overwhelming majority of participants support community action to encourage greater public action in response to these two bills,” says Wikipedia in a press release. “Of the proposals considered by Wikipedians, those that would result in a ‘blackout’ of the English Wikipedia, in concert with similar blackouts on other websites opposed to SOPA and PIPA, received the strongest support.”

Other sites, including Reddit, Boing Boing, and the Cheezburger network of comedy sites, did already announce that they would go dark on Wednesday. Facebook, Google, Tumblr and Twitter have vocally opposed the legislation. They argue that the bills could not only require Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) to block websites that are involved in digital file sharing, it could also prevent search engines such as Bing, Google and Yahoo from linking to them.

“We could not ever link to another website unless we were sure that no links to anything that infringes copyright appeared on that site,” said Boing Boing in an announcement on its website. “So in order to link to a URL on LiveJournal or WordPress or Twitter or Blogspot, we'd have to first confirm that no one had ever made an infringing link, anywhere on that site.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urges Internet users in the U.S. to call their Representative and send a letter to Congress to voice their protest against the proposed legislation.

Wikipedia plans to join other websites and go dark for 24 hours on Wednesday, January 18, in protest over proposed anti-piracy legislation. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

After submitting a request to claim a site, Facebook responded with the following email message: “Sorry! We can't confirm your place just yet. We didn't receive an official business document with your request. To claim your place, please reply to this email with one of the following documents in an attachment. We'll review it and do our best to help.

• A utility bill for your place of business
• Your local business license (issued by your city, county, state, etc.)
• A tax file for your business
• Certificate of Formation (for a partnership)
• Articles of Incorporation (for a corporation)”.

Since its launch in February 2004, Facebook was confronted with a long list of privacy related issues. In August 2007, PHP code used to dynamically generate home and user pages was displayed while accessing some accounts, raising concerns about data security. From November 2007 to September 2009, Facebook’s advertising system used a feature called Beacon to send data collected from external websites to the social networking site. After a class action lawsuit, the code was changed to require user approval for before any data gathered could be published.

Several governments are now recommending or requesting that employees refrain from using Facebook at work. In May 2007, federal public servants, MPPs, and cabinet ministers in Canada did see a warning message "The Internet website that you have requested has been deemed unacceptable for use for government business purposes" after trying to access Facebook. A number of local governments in Germany, the UK, and Finland imposed restrictions on the use of social networking sites due to privacy concerns. Thilo Weichert, data protection commissioner for the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, requested in 2011 that state institutions shut down fan pages on Facebook and remove the "Like" button from their websites.

"Whoever visits facebook.com or uses a plug-in must expect that he or she will be tracked by the company for two years," Weichert said. "Facebook builds a broad individual and for members even a personalized profile." To avoid being profiled, he urged Internet users to "keep their fingers from clicking on social plug-ins." He recommended that users "not set up a Facebook account."

In 2011, law students from Austria filed complaints with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner on how Facebook stores its users' information. One of the complaints relates to the fact that Facebook collects and stores email addresses from non-Facebook users when they are invited to connect by users of the social network. Ireland handles issues related to the social networking outside the U.S. and Canada since Facebook maintains an office in Dublin. The filings are now part of an audit by Irish authorities on how Facebook collects and stores information on millions of users in the European Union.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a public interest research group based in Washington, D.C., says that Facebook changed user privacy settings again with the recent transition to the Timeline profile. Users that did choose not to disclose new friends on their wall will now find that any new connection is displayed on their Timeline. In a letter (available here) send to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), EPIC asks whether changes Facebook has made are consistent with the terms of a settlement reached between Facebook and the FTC.

The social networking site doesn’t make it easy to say “Good Buy.” Simply closing a user account does not automatically delete the data associated with the profile, including ‘likes’, friends, comments, and images. If users really feel the need to “unfriend” Facebook, they can use this link. After logging in, they can proceed by clicking on the “Delete My Account” button. Facebook will ask to confirm the action by re-typing the password and a capture. After clicking yes, the network confirms the action by stating “Permanently Delete Account - Your account has been deactivated from the site and will be permanently deleted within 14 days. If you log into your account within the next 14 days, you will have the option to cancel your request.”

To verify that users and business entities are authentic, Facebook is now asking for articles of incorporation, business tax filings, business licenses, or copies of utility bills. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

“The success of the e-commerce channel will be enhanced by a multichannel approach, where retailers leverage the store to make the e-commerce channel even more appealing to consumers,” Mim Burt, research director at Gartner, said. “In many product categories, consumers prefer to shop online and take possession in the store. Multichannel retailers that offer the ability to order online and take possession in the store will be offering increased flexibility to customers, which should enhance revenue for them.”

The multichannel forecast shows that the U.K. leads the U.S. significantly in the current percentage of e-commerce, which was approximately 9.3 percent of retailers’ revenue in 2011. This contrasts with the U.S. percentage of slightly less than 5.3 percent of retailers’ revenue for 2011. U.S. retailers must focus on boosting e-commerce channel sales and become more multichannel aligned in their strategies. They can do this, for example, by leveraging their store assets to complement and enhance sales in both channels. Western European markets, particularly in the U.K., have benefited from generally high Internet penetration and usage, a higher online per capita expenditure, and a better multichannel fulfillment infrastructure.

“Executing on cross-channel consistency will prove challenging, as retailers continue to grapple with siloed business process and a plethora of disparate applications,” Burt said. “Most challenging are the product-centric organizational structures that are no longer suitable for today’s customer-centric approach, which should take full account of customers shopping across current and emerging touch points.”

Channels have grown as largely separate entities, and business metrics in retail remain overwhelmingly product and channel-focused. Retailers need to change internal organizational alignments to execute a consistent cross-channel shopping experience. Requirements of shoppers across channels and the customer shopping process should be their guiding principles, rather than focusing on the ROI of multichannel initiatives.

“Focusing on ROI on multichannel is a misnomer,” said John Davison, managing vice president at Gartner. “Retailers should focus on identifying the impact of investments in one channel on the other channels. For example, our multichannel retailers’ forecast shows revenue from the mobile channel through 2015 is less than 2 percent, but retailers should not underestimate the impact this channel will have in pushing sales to other channels. Equally, an expected drop in store revenue does not mean reduced investment in their stores. In fact, the store will require more investment targeted at cross-channel shopper fulfillment as its importance as the hub of the retailer’s multichannel offer increases.”

The U.K. leads the U.S. significantly in the current percentage of e-commerce, which accounted for approximately 9.3 percent of retailers’ revenue in 2011, compared to slightly less than 5.3 percent in the U.S. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

"At Comcast, we strive to minimize passing expenses on to our customers. However, from time to time it is necessary to increase certain fees in order to keep pace with the costs of running our business," Comcast says on its website here. "In the last several years, we have made significant upgrades to our network, customer equipment and software in order to provide a fast and reliable experience for our Business Class customers."

Comcast is the largest home Internet service provider in the United States. It also offers cable television and telephone service to both residential and commercial customers. In January 2011, the Philadelphia based company acquired a majority stake in media conglomerate NBC Universal. Comcast has significant holding in several cable networks, including E! Entertainment Television, G4, Style Network, and The Golf Channel. The company is active in 39 states and the District of Columbia.

Comcast Online was launched in 1996 to manage operations revolving around broadband Internet service. After acquiring Sarasota Online, the largest Internet service provider in Florida, the company quickly expanded into over 30 cities. Today, Comcast Online has about 17.8 million Internet subscribers. Comcast holds the Consumerist 2010 Worst Company In America award, which led competitor Verizon to publicly congratulate its rival via the Verizon Twitter feed. Comcast acknowledged the “award” immediately and promised to improve its customer service.

In their study of Twitter’s “contagion process,” the team looked at data from 16,000 U.S. cities, focusing on the 408 with the highest number of Twitter users and seeking to update traditional models of how information spreads and technology is adopted. Just as marketing experts sometimes label consumers as early adopters, early majority adopters, late majority adopters or laggards, the researchers characterized cities in those terms, based on when Twitter accounts in a given city reached critical mass. Critical mass is generally defined as the point when something reaches 13.5 percent of the population, which for this study was 13.5 percent of the highest total number of Twitter users in a city through August 2009, the end of the study period.

As with most technologies, the growth in popularity initially spread via young, tech-savvy “innovators,” in this case from Twitter’s birthplace in San Francisco to greater Boston. But the site’s popularity then took a more traditional route of traveling only short distances, implying face-to-face interactions. This approach made early adopters of Somerville and Berkeley - cities close to Boston and San Francisco, respectively. Twitter use then spread through early majority cities such as Santa Fe and Los Angeles and late majority cities such as Baltimore and Las Vegas before reaching laggards such as Palm Beach and Newark. All these cities ultimately ranked among the 408 nationwide with the largest numbers of Twitter accounts.

“Even on the Internet where we may think the world is flat, it’s not,” says Marta González, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and engineering systems at MIT, who is co-author of a paper on this subject appearing this month in the journal PLoS ONE. “The big question for people in industry is ‘How do we find the right person or hub to adopt our new app so that it will go viral?’ But we found that the lone tech-savvy person can’t do it; this also requires word of mouth. The social network needs geographical proximity.”

For nearly 50 years, marketers have studied the “diffusion of innovations” (named by Everett Rogers in his 1962 book of the same title) to predict how the purchase of expensive, durable goods such as cars and refrigerators will spread. But the diffusion of high-tech websites and cheap smartphone apps is thought to occur in a very different way.

“Nobody has ever really looked at the diffusion among innovators of a no-risk, free or low-cost product that’s only useful if other people join you. It’s a new paradigm in economics: what to do with all these new things that are free and easy to share,” says MIT graduate student Jameson Toole, a co-author of the paper.

Meeyoung Cha of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology is the third co-author, and also the person who had the prescience to begin downloading Twitter-published user data (via Twitter API) in May 2006, when there were only a couple of hundred users. She downloaded data through August 2009, when user growth dropped off for a time. González and Toole said their model of Twitter contagion didn’t fit Cha’s data until they added media influence, based on the number of news stories appearing weekly in Google News searches, data they acquired using Google Insights for Search, which provides historical search-engine data.

“Other studies have included news media in their models, but usually as a constant,” González says. “We saw that news media is not a constant. Instead, it’s media responding to people’s interest and vice versa, so we included it as random spikes.”

The study data include the growth spike that began April 15, 2009, when actor Ashton Kutcher challenged CNN to see who could first attract 1 million Twitter followers. Kutcher ultimately won, reaching the million mark in the wee hours of April 17, about half an hour before CNN. Popular talk-show host Oprah Winfrey invited Kutcher to appear on her show that same day; when she ceremoniously sent her first tweet, the pace of new news stories picked up again, and so did new Twitter accounts.

The Twitter bird was suddenly on all the wires, and Twitter’s user accounts increased fourfold because of the media attention, indicating that as recently as 2009, location-based social networks and media attention still held sway over computer-based social networks. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com