At the 2012 Grammys, Perry rolled on-stage with a blue wig and her hit song "E.T.", then abruptly transitioned into "Part of Me," which pop news sources have attributed to her break-up with Russell Brand. (There are lines like "So you can keep the diamond ring," for example.) Things just haven't been the same since Perry's religious parents have tried to hook her up with Jesus-lovin' Tim Tebow.

Yet Perry was formerly the queen of cotton candy cloud sensuality, of references to sucking Snoop Dogg's lollipop and a hyperfemininity that only a white girl of pastor parents could muster. Sweet and adoring in her innocence, Perry doesn't stand a chance against hardcore female rapper Nicki Minaj, who stole the 2012 Grammys with "Roman Holiday." Both a tribute to and a pushback against the movie "The Exorcist," Minaj's performance engaged the short attention spans of social media users, compelling them to post their own thoughts on Minaj's "interpretation" of Catholicism, exorcism and the use of highly charged religious imagery in pop culture social media spectacle.

In "Roman Holiday," Minaj performed an exorcism of her alter-ego, Roman Zolanski. By the end of the performance, she was levitating high above fires and clergy members. EOnline called Minaj's performance the "worst spectacle" of the 2012 Grammys.

"As much as we like the rap pixie, Nicki Minaj offered up a Lady Gaga-lite scary religious movie that was way too long, kinda silly and way annoying coming so late in the show," writes Erik Pedersen. "But hey, at least she can always ask her Pope-date for absolution!"

Whereas Katy Perry is a softcore, singsongy teenage dreamer girl who is stuck at last Friday night's drunken party, Nicki Minaj exists in a space of highly charged religious imagery, relying on a male narrative yet occupying space as a female body. This just one of the reasons "Roman Holiday" shook things up. Says Racialicious' LaToya Peterson quoting Menda Francois' thesis "Step Your Pussy Up: Nicki Minaj and the Signifyin(g) Tropes of Hardcore Female Rap":

Implicit in Minaj's Signification onto the male narrative is a strategic process of identity construction, relying primarily on the male narrative and male voice to help shape the hardcore female rapper's public image. Essentially, by engaging in dialogue with the male narrative, Minaj is aligning herself with male rappers and creating her identity as one of (pseudo)masculinity, an asset valuable to her role as a hardcore female rapper. It is within this genre that femcees operate as performers of gender and are most harshly judged by an injurious rubric of masculinity.

Unlike Perry's "E.T.", which relies on the fetishization of black male rapstar Kanye West as "alien" in a sci-fi trope, Minaj's "Roman Holiday" transcends this othered "outer space." Minaj's exorcism of her male alter-ego Roman Zolanski completes her transformation into hardcore rapper, one who is capable of simultaneously being both and neither. If she had possessed demons before the Grammys, she certainly does not now.

Yet some social media users took Minaj's performance too literally. "Nicki Minaj possessed by Demon Grammy Performance," reads an FTD News headline. YouTube commenter iJared TV announced that he was vehemently against any sort of "religious type thing" in pop culture music videos.

"If you bring in any religious type thing, like a Catholic priest...you're gonna lose a lot of your Catholic audience," he says in his YouTube video commentary. "I'm not Catholic or anything, but you don't disrespect religion in your music or anything." But Minaj was not disrespecting any sort of Catholic audience. Her on-stage transformation was her own, and out of it came her alter-ego, Roman Zolanski.

Did Nicki Minaj Save the Grammys?

According to NPR, she did. Her performance catapulted the event from just another awards show into a social media spectacle complete with Twitter and second screens:

We all well know that this is how mainstream pop music survives in the single-download age. No one style dominates, and as artists compete for attention, they're turning ever more hyperbolic. At the Grammys, this was best illustrated by Nicki Minaj's wild debut of the title track from her upcoming second album, Roman Holiday. A tribute to The Exorcist that more closely recalled a florid Dario Argento horror opera, the number included mock clergy, levitation and Minaj singing "I Feel Pretty" in an accent that would horrify Downton Abbey admirers. "Roman Holiday" sent the Twitterverse into hysterics. And it's impossible to think that wasn't part of the reason it was approved.

Minaj has officially and fully entered into the Twitterific pop culture mindshare. In fact, her entrance was christened by a friendly email from the Catholic League, who was very concerned about the "exorcism" of Minaj's male-gendered alter-ego and, implicitly, her use of the male narrative. Indeed, anything involving non-normative gender is cause for concern.

Some Twitter users like @savory1, a self-described "hard working soccer mom" in Orland Park, Illinois, defended Minaj's performance: "It was art get over it." Minaj fired back on Twitter with a few words, slamming the Catholic League and everyone who for some reason may fear their own alter-ego, or just themselves.

• "Were they offended by 'the devil inside'??? Shut-up & watch the movie b**ch!"
• "Not, 2, Not 1...I wish I at least had a point five percentile worth of f**ks to give right now."
• "And more importantly, love people for WHO they are. #nohate #nojudgement #nocondemnation."

Now, is that something Katy Perry could have said? Not without a lot of sugary sweet sentimentality.

Image via Flickr.

Sometimes it's difficult to catch everything that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

The Price of Free: Path Uploads Entire Address Book To Its Servers

Hacker Arun Thampi discovered today that Path is uploading your entire address book to its servers. Though most people don't expect this liberal sharing of data, Path doesn't warn you ahead of time. Path could generate hashes of the contact info locally, on the user's phone, and only upload that secure information to its servers, but it doesn't. It stores the whole address book unencrypted.

Reactions were strong across the internet today.

Wow @path sure stepped in the doodoo. plus.google.com/11109108952772... Not good @davemorin not good.

— Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) February 7, 2012

. @Path .. Is there an OPT OUT of you having my ENTIRE iphone address book on your server ?bit.ly/zKsLky /via @heykim

— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) February 8, 2012

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Apple to Developers: Don't Mess With Our App Store Rankings

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Wolfram Alpha Pro is "Freemium" Done Right

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Study: PDF May Be Creating More Paperwork Than It Saves

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A Croatian startup named ShoutEm that provides a platform for iOS and Android app creation created a timeline infographic of the history of the mobile app store. Starting in 2008 with the advent of Apple's App Store, the game has fundamentally changed. Check it out below.

The Android Market launched a couple months later in October and had 50 apps to start.

Research In Motion was not far behind, announcing BlackBerry App World at its developers' conference in October 2008 and accepting submissions from developers in early 2009. Nokia's Ovi Store opened in 2009, starting its short-lived run as the No. 2 global app store behind Apple's trailblazer.

The Windows Phone Marketplace launched in late October 2010. By July 2011 it had nearly 30,000 apps. As of Jan. 2012, it has almost 50,000. The BlackBerry App World had about 37,000 at the end of July 2011.

Apple reached the 100,000 app mark first, a little more than a year after launch, in November 2009. Skipping ahead, the Android Market hit 200,000 in early 2011 and nearly doubled its developer output through the remainder of the year. As of now, the Market has about 400,000 apps available while iOS has nearly 550,000.

Check out the timeline below. It ends in Aug. 2011 but we know the history since. The Ovi Store is in decline as Nokia gradually phases out the Symbian series, BlackBerry is in flux and awaiting new devices and trying to spur developers in to creating apps for the platform again while iOS and Android maintain exponential growth.

See the timeline on ShoutEm's blog here.

Convergence. Remember that word from the dot com era? Well, it's back and this time it actually has substance. Convergence in the 90s meant combining old media with new media, a.k.a. the Internet. The 2000 merger of AOL and Time Warner was a failed $200 billion attempt at convergence. But fast forward to 2012 and convergence is happening for real this time, thanks to Internet-connected devices in the house and a rapidly growing app ecosystem. Entertainment now flows freely through home networks, to multiple devices such as PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones and television sets.

According to one research firm, 2012 will be when convergence really hits its stride. A new report by IMS Research states that 2012 will be when the consumer electronics industry "finally realizes the promise of multi-screen content consumption."

It's not just Web connected hardware which is proliferating. Software is also finally fulfilling the long-held promise of convergence. We saw a great example earlier today, with version 3.0 of the video aggregator app Showyou being released. ReadWriteWeb's Jon Mitchell described it as "the remote control for web video."

The beauty of Showyou is that you can watch videos on a variety of devices: PC, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Kindle Fire, Apple TV. While I was eating my lunch today, I sat down in the living room and opened both my iPad and TV. I surfed to a music video on Showyou that I like and pressed the Apple "airplay" button on the iPad to transfer the video to my TV (via Apple TV).

I'm not entirely convinced that 2012 will be the year when this multi-screen promise is realized. During my lunchtime, I fiddled around a bit with Airplay before I got it working. Also home networks are not particularly user friendly for non-technical people. 2012 may well be a tipping point, when convergence within the home begins to take off. But we're not at the point of great user experiences yet.

In its report, IMS Research noted that an apps ecosystem for devices like the TV will be a key enabler of convergence in home entertainment. It also pointed to the growing amount of digital content available to consumers and "the changing habits of consumers regarding accessing, consuming and sharing digital content."

IMS Research predicts that the market for IP-enabled CE devices will grow from 2.2 billion devices shipped in 2011 to 3.5 billion in 2016. Note that this is just for home entertainment and portable consumer electronic devices. We reported last week that mobile industry group GSMA is predicting growth from 9 billion to 24 billion Internet-connected devices worldwide. The GSMA's figures include things like connected cars and IP-enabled washing machines.

Have you begun to consume entertainment in your home across multiple screens? If so, let us know in the comments what your current favorite household apps are.

I caught up with Berry this week to learn more about his experience growing HuffPost and what he's planning for his new projects. Following is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Paul Berry: We're 120 million unique visitors a month, 31-day view by Google Analytics. We're at 1.7 billion pageviews, still growing fast. To give an indicator of the velocity, at acquisition [about a year ago], we were 55 million uniques and about 700 million pageviews. So just by sheer volume of traffic and audience, those are big numbers.

The other piece is the complexity of my CMS, and sort of how wide and deep the technology is. The team that I was leading as CTO of the Huffington Post Media Group, I had product, design, and engineering for the Media Group. There are a bunch of domains that are powered by the technology. When I started at Huffington Post, it was metaphorically day two. We were 3 million unique visitors and 70 million pageviews a month and there were three of us in the tech team. The team that Tim Dierks takes over as the new CTO is about 220 people.

Paul Berry at Google I/O, 2009. Image by David Newman, ipadportraits.com.

And these 220 people are...

That includes a lot of designers and product and project managers. The core of Huffington Post... we had some innovations in how we would put the team together that were built out of a combination of our own character and culture and out of necessity. I was born in Mexico City, my wife is Bulgarian. International, I always knew, would mean a great deal to me. And in the last ten years and in previous jobs, I started to work out: How can you truly put together a dynamic global team? That was vital to Huffington Post.

The election year growth was driven by figuring that out. It was pretty stressful - we had no money. I couldn't just buy another server. And we had so much to accomplish. And what everyone wants from their tech team is to pull an all-nighter every single night. But you know that's not sustainable, so you know as much as you want it you can't have it. You can actually do it by playing that timezone game and passing batons. That was insanely vital to all of our growth at HuffPost. Literally HuffPost has people on every continent in every time zone. Eastern Europe and Latin America, India, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Philippines.

What were some of the technical challenges you had to deal with?

Scaling was always a point of pride that we never talked about. And we never talked about security. If you're spending a lot of time talking about security, it's because you've gone through a horrible Gawker hack type of moment, and it's terrible. You do internally talk about security, and you have a security team, and you do a lot to make it happen. But at the board or ops level, if you're talking about security or scalability, you're generally suffering. It's a point of pride that that was never a big topic at ops or board meetings. We had very, very few moments of actual downtime.

Facebook, Google, and Twitter were all fairly frustrated with the media landscape - how slow media companies were to implement stuff, how slow they were to be creative and to push the envelope. And that became the roadmap pillars: Editorial efficiency and pushing the envelope with partners. A lot of the stuff that I plan to take into the incubator and into the new company is that culture of pushing those limits.

So what are these new projects?

There's two parts to it. Both, unfortunately, I have to remain a little stealth about, or I guess a lot, annoyingly. Part of my contract with AOL allowed me to work on things during this transition. So I've actually had a team working on Rebel Mouse for a while. I'm really excited about releasing some alpha and beta stuff in recent months.

Rebel Mouse is the startup company that's well defined - it has its name and its logo and it's a really well-defined concept that we're deep into. The incubator is a way to give us space to throw a lot of stuff up on the wall. It's not meant to be a 500 Startups thing, where there's a ton of companies. It's going to be much more sharing a technology stack and a social approach. And it will be social, web, and mobile that defines the companies that we end up creating. What we'll be doing is trying with a very small but elite and awesome team to take things into prototypes that start to gain real traction and go viral, and at that point, fund those into companies that we build into really big businesses.

My definition of viral is: We don't spend on marketing and ads. And that was another point of pride at Huffington Post. We never spent on SEM, it was always SEO. We never went and bought Facebook ads, we just did really well at social. These things have to have their own organic growth, where they hit this mark where you see them growing by themselves. Then you realize we have something now that we can double down on and go raise money and built that toward a big business.

Are there any specific technologies that have been particularly useful to you at HuffPost?

When I started with HuffPost about six years ago, there was still debate about whether open source would win or not. I think that has been answered. The open source stack - whichever you end up using - you have tremendous potential. It's crazy how much has been built out the last five years. The trick has really been to keep up with those sorts of things the way you keep up with a Facebook, or a Google, or a Twitter, and their product releases.

One of the surprises has been that MySQL - when Oracle bought MySQL, everyone thought it would die - and it's actually very much alive. We use Redis ("sort of a database alternative") a lot at Huffington Post, for example. There are some of these core technology stacks and open-source libraries and etc. that we'll definitely be using at the incubator.

For each "a" answer, award 0 points
For each "b" answer, award 1 point
For each "c" answer, award 2 points

Bonus round: Add half a point for every service that your companion uses that you don't.

• Klout
• Twitter
• Github
• Instagram
• Pinterest

Now add up your points.

If you got less than 10, your guy or gal doesn't have any geek cred. Accept your fate or move on.

Between 11 - 20, you still rule in the tech department. If your companion is male, be careful about that fragile male ego, and try to be gentle when explaining tech topics. If your companion is female, try not to overdo the tech lingo when answering questions.

Over 25, you got a real gem here and try to overlook the personal grooming deficiencies. Your companion could be the next Mark Zuckerberg.

Our opening icon is from http://absurdlynerdly.wordpress.com.

Verizon users get a free trial for one week. A monthly subscription costs $3.99, and an annual subscription costs $39.99. Publisher Greg Clayman told paidContent that The Daily currently has 100,000 paid subscribers on the iPad. It needs 500,000 to break even.

News Corp has put its weight behind The Daily. It hired a large, accomplished team, and chairman/CEO Rupert Murdoch reportedly invested $30 million personally. Murdoch says The Daily's costs are about "half a million dollars a week."

Though paid subscriptions have grown about 25% since it last reported numbers in October, that's a steep hill to climb. Staci Kramer at paidContent wrote in October that "[t]he shelf life of other News Corp. digital experiments suggests the Daily isn't likely to survive... unless it shows real signs it can get in the black."

David Brinker, The Daily's senior VP of business development and operations, wondered aloud to The Wrap yesterday whether it should have launched on February 2 of this year instead. Was The Daily ahead of its time? Brinker gave his publication a wide berth, saying the market could take three years to develop.

Meanwhile, since the launch of Apple's iOS 5 and Newsstand feature, The Daily has some competition for its vision of the future of newspapers. Expanding to Android devices gives The Daily a chance to diversify. Android tablets have begun to chip away at the iPad's dominance, occupying about 20% of the market.

News Corp has had some issues with digital media lately. After Murdoch joined Twitter, the company verified an impostor account pretending to be his wife.

How do you read your digital news?

Perhaps the most surprising announcement is that Ubuntu is coming out with a touch and gesture based TV operating system that can be controlled with a smartphone. MobiTV, a popular smartphone application, has joined forces with Deutsche Telecom for its "TV Everywhere" initiative. As if TV were not already everywhere. The MobiTV partnership will bring television to smartphones, tablets, PCs, set-top-boxes and ... whatever. If it has a screen, TV is coming to it in one way or another. TiVo has a new Android app that it announced this morning.

Conspicuously missing from all this great TV-based innovation? The Apple TV. Everyone is talking about it though, so I guess Apple wins CES. Again.

The fact of the matter is that the confluence of television and mobile platforms is going to be a major story this year. It almost comes to the point where we might need to start questioning the very definition of a "mobile" platform. Televisions are almost the opposite of mobile. They are quite stationary, actually. The only thing mobile about a TV is the remote and ... wait, where did I put that thing again?

The goal is two-fold. TV developers would like to bring the closest resemblance of cable and live television to mobile devices. On the other hand, mobile developers would like to bring the best representation of the Web and mobile apps to stationary TV sets. This is not a case where the two sides will meet somewhere in the middle and split the difference. Each scenario is likely to evolve in parallel over the next year.

Who wins when television is built on top of mobile operating systems like Android or iOS? App developers, multimedia and premium content providers, hardware manufacturers, CPU and GPU processors and advertisers come to mind. App developers will have the ability to expand their offerings to larger screens tied to mobile platforms. Advertisers looking to leverage apps as an expanding base for of reaching consumers will be on board. These apps will be driven by the multimedia and premium content providers. When devices have more functionality, the entire hardware supply chain benefits from consumer interest.

Who loses when TV, the Web and mobile platforms converge? Mostly, the "pipes." The pipes are the bandwidth providers that are responsible for carrying content and applications from sources to devices. The more options that are available to get mobile content on your TV outside of AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Comcast, Cox and bandwidth providers, the harder it is for the pipes to monetize that content. This is precisely what the pipes do not want, to become "dumb" pipes. Yet, the ability for Android to run apps and content on TVs without going through the pipes fundamentally threatens the value-added content services that each company is trying to rollout.

That is why we see the carriers trying to work from the other end. For instance, AT&T wants you to watch TV on your mobile device with its U-Verse application. Verizon touts all the capabilities of FiOS on your TV or mobile device. Samsung is making it easier for paid-TV subscribers to stream certain content to mobile devices with a new offering called "Samsung N Service."

The convergence of TV and mobile will play out well into the future. We heard ripples come out last year at CES but the onramp is now becoming crowded. What it comes down to is the notion that the mobile platforms, Android specifically, have a far more disruptive reach than many pundits originally predicted. Not only are smartphones changing how users consume information, mobile operating systems are on a path to fundamentally change how content is delivered.

The OPEN act sponsored by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., would allow the International Trade Commission to order online ad networks and payment processors to sever ties withe foreign websites that are targeted by patent infringement claims.

SOPA, and its Senate counerpart, PIPA, on the other hand, would force search engines and websites to block links to sites that are listed as being "dedicated" to copyright infringement. SOPA has been widely endorsed by traditional media companies, but Web firms and free speech advocates have likened it to government-enforced censorship.

The OPEN Act does have some flaws, and in some points parralells SOPA, as noted by technology and law blogger Eric Goldman. Goldman notes that, like SOPA, OPEN "assumes there is a problem with foreign rogue websites that needs to be solved...and more importantly, attacking the money supply to supposed bad actors remains too blunt an instrument."

"While OPEN can't really be fixed to resolve my two structural concerns, my hope is that the discussion about OPEN will force rightsowners to provide *credible* evidence of harms that they or consumers are suffering (no more self-serving hype, please), and that such evidence will force us to think carefully about how 'rifle shot' solutions (as opposed to shotgun solutions) can ameliorate those harms," Goldman said.

"Blogging is largely dead."

"There are a lot of stupid people out there ... and stupid people shouldn't write."

"There needs to be a better system for tuning down the stupid people and tuning up the smart people."

Serial entrepreneur and publisher Jason Calacanis has never been opposed to saying what is on his mind. In fact, it is the characteristic that has helped him rise to the top of the Internet publishing world. He sat down with our managing editor Abraham Hyatt onstage at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit on Monday and dished on his thoughts about the state of publishing, what Google's Panda initiative is doing to websites and what Web 3.0 will be about.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Web 3.0: The Age of Expertise

"You have to have a deep understanding to be a blogger," Calacanis said.

Calacanis thinks that Web 3.0 will be the "Age of Expertise." Blogging brought about the era of Web 2.0 where people who may not have had a voice before could publish whatever they want. The rise of kittens on the Web, for instance. Add the ability to comment on stories and then share them through social media and Web 2.0 was the Age of Interactivity.

"The concept of journalism is going away," Calacanis said. "It is not enough to be a writer. You need to be a writer and an expert."

Calacanis brings up the idea of local news as something that people do not care about. In that vein, he thinks that AOL local news effort Patch, which the company has poured millions of dollars into, will ultimately fail. Instead of just the news of a local McDonalds being built, people want how much that new franchise will cost, what benefit it will have for the local economy etc.

"People bring up the edge case of the local town meeting," Calacanis said. "Who gives a f***l? Nobody cares anymore."

The blog itself is not going away. People will continue to have a voice and low barrier to put that voice on the Web. Yet, that doesn't mean that anybody will be paying attention.

"People and their blogs will continue," Calacanis said. "But, I think that experts will inherit the space."

That is what Calacanis is starting to do with Mahalo. He considers the site to be a "video education company." He wants employees who are a "triple threat" - the ability to shoot video, edit and produce video and be the host of the video.

On Mahalo vs. Google Panda and Launch

As Experian reported in April, Mahalo's traffic has been crushed by the changes to Google's algorithm - codenamed Panda - designed to limit the affect of content farms in search results.

"Yeah, Panda has cut our traffic in half," Calacanis said. "Yet, it didn't affect our YouTube traffic at all."

Essentially, Calacanis sees the future of the Web through the lenses of experts who produce video. He does not hold out hope that he can approach Google to tweak Panda so that Mahalo does not suffer along with the rest of the so-called content farms.

Calacanis is also betting on the resurrection of the email newsletter, this time as an interactive discussion engine of experts. His newest venture is called Launch and is centered around tech news. And as he is known to do, Calacanis is predicting big things.

"Within a year, Launch will have more traffic than TechCrunch," Calalcanis said.

"Google and Facebook would have you believe that you're a mirror," he said, "but in fact, we're more like diamonds." - multi-faceted. It was an appeal reminiscent of the one he gave at SXSW earlier this year, but it hit harder. Google Plus has since arrived, and Poole says it's even worse than Facebook for the future of online identity.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Identity Is Prismatic

"The portrait of identity online is often painted in black and white," Poole said. "Who you are online is who you are offline." That rosy view of identity is complemented with a similarly oversimplified view of anonymity. People think of anonymity as dark and chaotic, Poole said.

But human identity doesn't work like that online or offline. We present ourselves differently in different contexts, and that's key to our creativity and self-expression. "It's not 'who you share with,' it's 'who you share as,'" Poole told us. "Identity is prismatic."

Choosing Our Own Identities

"We were on the right track at one point," Poole said. In the early days of the Web, its creators used their real names because they were the only people online. As the namespace got more crowded, people started using handles.

AOL Instant Messenger brought screen names to the mainstream. Poole said he agonized over his AOL handle, because he knew it would be a representation of him. That insight persists today at hacker conventions, where the real Web experts hang out. People there introduce themselves with their handles, because that's how they have chosen to identify.

"Twitter does the best job of this" of today's major social networks, Poole said. The platform itself uses handles and allows made-up answers in the real name field. Furthermore, "most of the apps allow multiple accounts. Facebook would never allow this, right?" He says Google Plus is the worst; you don't even get a vanity URL to distinguish yourself, and we all know how Google Plus handles pseudonyms: they delete the accounts.

Google & Facebook Are Eroding Our Options

Google and Facebook are "consolidating identity and making people seem more simple than they really are," Poole said. "Our options are being eroded."

Poole's bottom line is that there's a big market opportunity in this authentic, fluid kind of identity, which the big players are willfully abandoning. "You can incorporate identity without forcing your users to sacrifice something." Poole believes a Web network can validate an account using legitimate services without forcing the presentation of that user to be an over-simplification.

Creativity and self-expression are at stake, Poole says, and he's particularly concerned about young people. Facebook's new Timeline will lock people into their Facebook identities from birth.

Speaking at Facebook recently, Poole told its developers that they set the bar for identity, but he has since realized he was wrong: we, the users, do. "We're about to sacrifice something that's valuable, and it's special."

"I would ask us all to strive for this ideal when we design products, and as users on the Web, what we demand of services," Poole said. "Facebook and Google do identity wrong, Twitter does it better, and I want people to think about what the world would be like if we did it right."

Check out the Web 2.0 schedule and watch the events live here.

There is a lot that may be wrong with SOPA, but putting the power to censor the Internet into the hands of the government is chief among citizens' concerns. The law would force Internet Service Providers and search engines to cut off access to infringing sites as well as give the government the ability to stop payment to those sites. How would SOPA work? What do you need to know about the bill heading into 2012? We take a deep dive into everything you need to know below.

SOPA (bill text) sets up a variety of ways for the U.S. government to block sites that are seen to be infringing on intellectual property. The bill is tailored towards the entertainment industry to protect movie studios, TV networks and record labels from having foreign websites illegally copying and distributing copyrighted works.

Along with the Protect IP Act of 2011, here are the ways the U.S. government can enforce the proposed laws.

1. Force ISPs to block access to Domain Name System servers to infringing foreign sites. Here is the pertinent portion of Section 102 of SOPA: A service provider shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures designed to prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) that is subject to the order, including measures designed to prevent the domain name of the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) from resolving to that domain name's Internet Protocol address.

2. Force search providers to make such sites that have been flagged as infringing undiscoverable.
Prevent the foreign infringing site that is subject to the order, or a portion of such site specified in the order, from being served as a direct hypertext link.

3. Force payments processors to shut down the ability for infringing sites to make money.
Suspend its service from completing payment transactions involving customers located within the United States or subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and the payment account.

4. Force Internet advertisers to cease doing business with an infringing site.
Prevent its service from providing advertisements to or relating to the foreign infringing site that is subject to the order or a portion of such site specified in the order.

Who would be affected by these mandates from the Attorney General? Foremost, Google. Items 2-4 would directly relate to properties owned or maintained by the search giant. Google is the largest search provider on the planet and has the largest Internet advertising business. It also acts in conjunction with payment processors for its Google Checkout application.

PayPal would also have to comply with notices to cease payments. As would VISA, MasterCard, American Express and other payment processors. Both Visa and MasterCard are on record for supporting SOPA.

Most of the ISPs are onboard with SOPA, including ComCast. That creates an interesting scenario as ComCast also owns NBC. If the power to block infringing sites is left with the ISPs, who is to tell them that they cannot block content that is perceived to be competing with its own?

Who Supports SOPA?

Rep. Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee: Smith's office wrote the bill and he is the primary sponsor.
Rep. Bob Goodlatte, chairman of the subcommittee on intellectual property, competition and the Internet of the House judiciary committee.
Rep. Mel Watts, ranking member of the subcommittee on intellectual property, competition and the Internet of the House judiciary committee. Watts was the congressman that made the comments about not understanding how the Internet works.
Rep. Howard Berman, member subcommittee on intellectual property, competition and the Internet of the House judiciary committee.

In addition to those four members of the House Judiciary, the Recording Industry Association of America, Most Picture Association of America, most of Hollywood and its various labor organizations (like the Directors Guild), support SOPA.

Gizmodo published the full list of companies that have signed on for support of SOPA. GoDaddy.com is a prominent name as it is a company with its fundamental nature tied to DNS. Prominent names include: Comcast, ABC, ESPN, CBS, Teamsters, Major League Baseball, Sony, Time Warner, Viacom and Warner Music.

Who Is Against SOPA?

Almost all of the major tech corporations are against SOPA. TechCrunch came up with a list of 40 companies that are opposing the bill and the companies that we would think would oppose it are present.

That includes:

Facebook, Google, eBay/PayPal, Foursquare, Kaspersky, Reddit, Mozilla, Tumblr, Twitter, Yahoo, Scribd, Quora, Github, Square, AOL.

In terms of politicos, the only major GOP presidential candidate to touch on the issue is Rep. Michelle Bachmann.

Here are the other major opponents:
Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman on Oversight and Government reform and also on the House Judiciary Committee. He is the most prominent opponent and frequently tweets about SOPA/PIPA on his Twitter account.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, member House Judiciary Committee.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz, member subcommittee on intellectual property, competition and the Internet of the House judiciary committee.
Rep. Jared Polis, the new "champion of the Internet." Polis is the Judiciary Committee member who made several proposed changes to SOPA to make a court order necessary to take down a website.
Rep. Mike Honda, aligned himself with Bachmann on SOPA and has been involved in technology legislation for more than a decade.

The top four representatives listed were the individuals responsible for the markups in the SOPA bill that brought two days of debate to the committee. Essentially, the proposed amendments acted as a filibuster (an intentional delay of vote caused by prolonged political debate) that caused the Judiciary Committee to postpone the debate until the next Congressional session.

Prominent think tank, The Heritage Foundation has come out against SOPA. This is significant as it has deep ties to the GOP and most of the representatives pushing for SOPA are Republicans.

What Are The Next Steps?

SOPA needs to make it out of the Congressional committee. This is likely to happen, according to Government 2.0 correspondent Alex Howard of O'Reilly Media (and sometimes ReadWriteWeb contributor). The next step will be on the House floor where all it needs is majority to make it through to the Senate. That will likely take until the middle of the spring and will give people a chance to complain to their Senators about the bill.

The key for SOPA will be to see if the Senate passes it with a 60-40 majority. If the Senate does pass SOPA by a two-thirds majority (67 votes), President Obama cannot veto the bill, which he would likely do in an election year where much of his campaign will be Internet focused.

Update 2:28 p.m. EST Dec. 23: This article has been corrected from its original version to note that 67 votes (not 60) are needed for a presidential override.

PIPA comes up for debate on the Senate floor on the first day of the 2012 session, January 24th. The battle lines for PIPA will determine much of what subsequently happens to SOPA. Senator Harry Reid is going to introduce the bill to the Senate. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden has promised to block it and filibuster the bill when it reaches debate.

Who & What To Watch

On the other hand, there are the major networks. All of the TV networks are supporters of the bill. How will they choose to cover the bill? Will they give it the same due diligence as other bills?

Who To Follow?

We will do our best at ReadWriteWeb to stay abreast of what is happening with SOPA and PIPA. The tech news team at Politico (@morningtech) is probably the best sourced in the industry. CNET and The Hill are both on top of SOPA as well. Howard (@digiphile) at O'Reilly has published one of the best primers of SOPA on the Web and is always in touch with what is happening in government technology circles.

We will be monitoring SOPA and deconstructing its consequences for the next several months. For instance, there are significant costs to SOPA, both for the startup ecosystem, the entertainment industry, regulatory bodies and individual citizens. There are significant cybersecurity risks to be considered as well. Stay tuned at ReadWriteWeb as we follow what could be one of the biggest stories that affects the Web in the last 10 years.

This year we're pleased to etch a fifth name onto the Best BigCo trophy (although like our own little company, the trophy is virtual). Our Best BigCo of 2011 has been around since the Dot Com era, but what's most impressive is how it has disrupted entirely new markets over the past year. Our Best BigCo for 2011 is...

Founded in 1994 by the impressive Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com launched in 1995 as an online bookstore. It took a good decade for it to fully establish its e-commerce operations. The diversification of Amazon.com essentially started in March 2006, with the launch of an online storage service called Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Later that year it launched Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a set of server farms that could be used by other businesses. These moves turned out to be prescient, as cloud computing has since turned into a huge market. More importantly, it gave Amazon.com the infrastructure and technical nous to become a direct competitor to Google, Apple and Microsoft.

We've chosen Amazon.com as our Best BigCo this year because, simply put, it lived up to its hype. It launched a number initiatives this year and all of them have worked out. Here are some of Amazon.com's biggest achievements in 2011:

1. Its Kindle product (first launched in 2007) evolved and continues to dominate the eReader market. It also launched an eBook lending service.
2. It took on Apple by launching a low-priced tablet called Kindle Fire (including a new browser called Silk). The Kindle Fire is significant to Amazon.com because it's a media platform - for the books, apps, videos and over-content that it sells.
3. It consistently added to the Prime video catalog, making it a very competitive offering compared to market leaders Netflix and Hulu.
4. It furthered the cause of HTML5 in publishing, by becoming the first major company to challenge Apple's stranglehold over the iOS App Store. It did this by releasing an HTML5 version of Kindle, to try to get around Apple's 30% cut of all revenue from iOS apps.
5. Its Amazon Cloud Drive is a competitive consumer cloud offering, at least on a par with Apple's iCloud (which launched months after Amazon) and Microsoft's SkyDrive.
6. It has gone from strength to strength with the aforementioned business cloud platforms, S3 and EC2. Collectively known as Amazon Web Services (AWS), that division is closing in on $1 billion a year in revenue. AWS did have some downtime this year, however.
7. It launched Appstore For Android this year, an important step forward for both Android users and developers.
8. It even got a bit fancy, with the November launch of an augmented reality shopping app for the iPhone called Flow.

As you can see, Amazon.com has had a stellar product year. Although it should be noted that the Kindle Fire and other developments have made a dent in its profits. That won't worry Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos though, who has proven himself this year to be one of the Web's leading visionaries. He has pushed Amazon.com into areas that nobody would've predicted back in 1995.

The Runners-up

Apple undeniably had a great year too and is a close runner-up to Amazon.com for Best BigCo. Apple released iPhone 5 and iPad 2, both well-regarded and innovative (Siri in particular caught peoples imagination). Apple also continued to dominate the mobile app market and launched iCloud.

Google and Facebook both had strong years too. Google+ and Chrome are two big mainstream products that Google launched or rapidly evolved this year. In the end though, we felt that Google still has a lot to prove with those two platforms (social and browser, respectively). Likewise with Facebook, although it innovated impressively this year with Timeline, smart lists and frictionless sharing (to name just a few of its iterations in 2011), it remains to be seen how its huge user base reacts to the new-look Facebook. Most of its users don't have Timeline yet, for example.

Honorable Mentions

Although Microsoft didn't have any breakthrough hit products in 2011, it continued to at least keep pace with its competitors on the Web. For example, Bing made solid progress as a search engine alternative to Google.com. Twitter had another strong growth year and its various redesigns have been brave and largely successful. Although eBay dropped the ball with the Skype acquisition, it had a good year in its core e-commerce market. In the enterprise space, IBM, Oracle and Salesforce.com all had good years.

Also Rans

The once mighty Yahoo had a terrible year, as did HP. AOL has been trying to turn itself around, but hasn't been helped by power struggles and public in-fighting amongst its media properties. Adobe and Mozilla both continue gamely on, but they're struggling to keep up with the pace of change.

Your Thoughts?

To end on a positive note, there's no doubt in our minds that Amazon.com is a worthy Best BigCo. Its innovation and determination to challenge the likes of Apple and Google has been fascinating to watch. Do you agree with our choice? Let us know in the comments.

Fusion Garage is also the maker of the Grid 10 tablet, an Android slate that was released to terrible reviews and poor sales. As of Monday morning, a Grid 10 tablet was not available through the company's website. Fusion Garage appears to be on its way to a shallow grave, its path to demise lined with broken promises and bad products.

Make no mistake, Fusion Garage's woes are progress. The tablet market can only withstand so many suppliers and the low end of the ecosystem already has established bottom feeders Acer and Asus cranking out cheap slates that most consumers will pass over.

With the Amazon Kindle Fire and the Barnes & Noble Nook providing cheap tablets that consumers actually want to buy, the squeeze is being put on the rest of the Android tablet market (or, really, the non-iPad market). The weak companies are going to start to die off if they don't find a strategy that actually makes money. Hewlett-Packard was probably smart to discontinue the HP TouchPad. Get out of the market before it collapses entirely and new products make your efforts look poor in comparison.

Another thing that hobbled Fusion Garage is the fact that they were never seen as playing fair. TechCrunch founder and now venture capitalist Michael Arrington has had a very public feud over the tablet that become the JooJoo. The project was originally supposed to be called the CrunchPad and would have pre-dated the release of the first iPad by months. Fusion Garage eventually cut ties with Arrington, released the JooJoo independently and were subsequently sued for fraud and breach of contract. That case is still ongoing, with AOL now representing TechCrunch's interests. Arrington posted to his personal blog this weekend that Fusion Garage's attorney has filed to be taken off the case because the company has not paid him and the relationship had become strained beyond repair.

Fusion Garage public relations company, McGrath/Power, dropped Fusion Garage earlier this year.

The signs are pretty clear: everybody involved with Fusion Garage is running away, the company is embroiled in lawsuits, the brand name is tarnished beyond repair and the one thing that could save it, the product, is insufficient.

The old guard of TechCrunch employees are reveling in Fusion Garage's woes. Arrington said, "Fusion Garage finally destroying itself certainly makes me happy. The fact that Quinn Emanuel and PR firm McGrath Power, who advised Fusion Garage on the right way to execute on the fraud, are left with unpaid bills also makes me happy. I'm sorry to the customers who tried to pre-order these things and may never see their money again. But, really, what were you thinking?"

At this point, there is probably nothing Fusion Garage can do to avoid the inevitable collapse. Call it progress, call it revenge, call it whatever you like. In 10 years, Fusion Garage, the CrunchPad/JooJoo/Grid 10 will be the answer to a trivia question that only a select group of geeks will be able to answer.

Sometimes it's difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

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