ReadWriteWeb

So what just happened? Well, several of the world's most prominent Web destinations interrupted their regular programming to remind their readers of the dangers of a world where certain content may be arbitrarily made to disappear. For most Americans, this was probably the first they'd seen of any efforts by Congress to change the Internet, for whatever reason they'd want to do so.

They were given links to click on to learn more. Some of those links led to the White House Web site, where over a hundred thousand people signed petitions urging the President to veto any bill that would suborn Internet censorship. A few of those links led, to our own surprise, to ReadWriteWeb; and for a few hours yesterday, our traffic rose to unprecedented levels.

The next phase of Reddit's war against the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) will begin next week when the social news community will black out its website for a period of 12 hours. In place of Reddit's user-ranked news and lively conversations will be commentary and information about SOPA, as well as video of congressional testimony about the proposed legislation.

This is just Reddit's latest strike against SOPA, a topic that has been front-and-center on the site for months now. Its community of users have turned the discussion into a type of digital activism, launching a successful boycott campaign against GoDaddy and rallying support for candidates running against pro-SOPA politicians.

In September 2010, the U.S. Senate debated the latest draft of a bill for combatting online piracy. You may think you've heard of this bill, but there's a good chance you haven't. It was called COICA. It had a provision that seemed strange, as though it belonged to another era.

It called for the creation of some type of site or service that would publish a list of Web sites suspected of trafficking in illicit or counterfeit intellectual property. The hope was that someone might write a plug-in or a browser patch that would act the same way anti-porn filters work, by denying users access. The concept was denounced as a kind of blacklist.

It used to be that large companies could pretty much do as they pleased in their ongoing quest to maximize profits and please shareholders. It was only when the harm done to workers, consumers, the environment or a firm's own self image got particularly bad that anything changed. This isn't to say that all big companies do bad things, but some do and in the industrial age, they could often get away with it pretty easily.

Well, the industrial age has given way to the information age and the balance of power is shifting further and further toward consumers, especially those with actively Web-connected lives. For a telling example, look no further than the recent fiasco surrounding GoDaddy and their now former support for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

The list of companies that support the controversial piece of U.S. legislation called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is fairly predictable. It includes huge media conglomerates, music industry groups, pharmaceutical companies and the like. One name that stands out, however, is that of domain name registrar GoDaddy. Whereas many of the big Web technology companies have come out in opposition to SOPA, GoDaddy enthusiastically supports the proposed law.

Not unsurprisingly, this news does not sit well with many of the Internet's most vocal SOPA opponents, especially on Reddit. A thread that popped up on the site today decries GoDaddy's support for SOPA and encourages users to transfer their domains to another provider. The conversation, which has more than a few choice words for GoDaddy, has grown quite long.

This week LinkedIn announced they are acquiring hosted search service IndexTank, and will incorporate their technology into the overall LinkedIn search algorithms. IndexTank powers the search behind Reddit.com, Spoke and Blip.tv, among others. LinkedIn claims more than 120 million members, with half outside the US and two million company pages on its service.

For a long time, it was the folks who downloaded music or movies illegally that faced the wrath of government prosecutors. So the unsealing of an indictment today against Aaron Swartz, former Reddit-er and founder of Demand Progress, for the illegal download of some 4 million-odd academic journal articles may sound a bit unusual.

Demand Progress has issued a statement suggesting Swartz's actions were akin to "checking too many books out of the library." But the government clearly disagrees as the charges include wire fraud, computer fraud, and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer. Schwartz now faces up to 35 years in prison and up to $1 million in fines.

Reddit went down for a period of six hours early Friday morning, making it look as bad as any service does when its millions of visitors suddenly can't get to their beloved community.

It's not a good thing. But according to one former Reddit employee, who left Reddit for Hipmunk last week, the problem has been going on for months with Amazon Web Services (AWS). "Ketralnis," writes that in the past year the issues have even escalated to the office of the CIO. Ketralnis is the user name for David King.

In the comments to the post, people question Amazon Web Services as the right provider for the Reddit service. Another former Reddit employee, Mike Raldi says in the comments that Reddit should have been taken off Amazon last Fall.

This week, an IBM supercomputer dubbed Watson took on Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a competition, pitting natural language processing and machine learning versus two Jeopardy champions. The three-day tournament ended on Wednesday with Watson soundly whooping its competitors. Now that it's over you might wonder how it was done. What problems did the team behind Watson run into along the way? What's next?

If you head on over to social bookmarking site Reddit, you can ask them yourself. The site has gotten the IBM research team behind Watson to agree to hold a Q&A with Redditors and is fielding questions for the next several days.

Social news site Reddit posted year-end numbers this afternoon including January and December page view stats that climbed from 250 million pageviews to more than 3X that number, 829 million.

Former ReadWriteWeb writer Frederic Lardinois wrote up the numbers on his personal blog Newsgrange (we miss you, Frederic!) and said he did not believe that Digg's troubles this year were the cause of Reddit's growth. But I think it's hard to believe that wasn't a major factor. Digg has long been the much bigger social news site but has slowed to a crawl after users grew unsatisfied with changes made by management seeking to make the site more democratic, more personalized and more mainstream. The resulting exodus couldn't help but have contributed at least some growth to Reddit, a site that's very similar in function if very different in tone. Either way, the moral of the story may be that social news, voted on by users in aggregate, is not dead.