One man in particular is staging a protest against the censorship: He is calling for everyone in China to abandon the Internet on the day the new rule takes effect. According to GlobalPost, Beijing artist and prominent political critic Ai Weiwei wants other Chinese citizens to realize their own power.

Weiwei has a reputation for being a hugely prolific blogger, generating around 3,000 posts in his first three years of writing online. He also uses Twitter, Chinese microblogging service Fanfou, and other sites to spread the word about freedom of expression and overt criticism of the government in China.

On July 1, he is calling for all of China's 300 million Internet users to completely log off for the day. In the original post, even Ai noted, "Chinese people are very practical. They think 'Oh, what's that going to do?'" He is aware the action he's requesting is huge; however, he feels that even a small gesture of protest will have an impact.

In his own words, "A small act is worth a million thoughts."

Given Westerners' sudden bout of green-tinted solidarity with Iranian protesters, we do wonder if Weiwei's call to action (via online inaction) will spread beyond China. What effect do you think Weiwei's protest will have? How can those of us in other countries best express our own disapproval of that nation's censorship policies? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

The blackout is part of a week of action against S92, declares a press release by the Creative Freedom Foundation, a non-profit group in NZ that has similar copyright concerns to those made famous internationally by Lawrence Lessig. The Creative Freedom Foundation will also announce a S92 song remix challenge this week, and "various other initiatives including video commercials and radio broadcasts will follow."

Creative Freedom Foundation Director Bronwyn Holloway-Smith said in the press release that "if the [New Zealand] government choses to keep this law, they will be going against international trends, treating NZ as an international lab-rat for this kind of legislation". Similar legislation has already been rejected in other countries, such as Germany and the UK. Juha Saarinen on The Techsploder calls S92 "arguably the world's harshest copyright enforcement law". He argues that the new law is "there for the large entertainment organisations to terrorise Internet users" and that it "isn't going to help artists and others rights holders."

It is important to note that the law only applies to telcos and ISPs, but that copyright holders (e.g. the entertainment industry) can demand that ISPs disconnect internet access for those people they accuse of copyright infringement. P2P users and website owners who allegedly have copyrighted material on their websites are most likely to be the target. While some of those people may actually be copyright offenders, what has upset the Creative Freedom Foundation is that disconnection can occur simply by accusation - the phrase 'innocent until proven guilty' becomes meaningless.

If you think the protest is worth supporting, you can sign an online petition here - and of course black out your social network profile!

UPDATE: Here's a video about the issue, made by Chelfyn Baxter from theg33kshow.com and voiced by Oliveroo.

In many ways, the reactions from Google's users are quite typical. As Lou Cabron points out, since Google updated iGoogle, its users have started the obligatory online petition that urges Google to allow users to keep the old version of iGoogle, created Greasemonkey scripts to roll the layout back themselves, and started a Facebook group that protests 'forced website redesigns' in general.

On Google's own discussion board, users posted the phone numbers and email addresses of a number of Google engineers and product mangers involved in the iGoogle project.

Most users especially disliked the move of the tabs from the top of the page into a sidebar on the left of the screen.

Not Just Google: Yahoo Profiles

Google was not the only company suffering from this over the weekend. While the New York Times lauded Yahoo for only making small, incremental changes to its homepage, Yahoo's radical switch to a new profile page (while also resetting everybody's profile at the same time) upset quite a few of its users. Yahoo's own blog post about the switch has over 600 negative comments.

Give Users the Option to Go Back

Users, for many reasons, tend to resist change. Even though it is often only a very vocal minority that really takes issue with these changes, companies need to take these complaints seriously.

As more software moves into the cloud, one of the most lauded aspects of cloud computing - the fact that a company can quickly make updates to a product - can now also become a publicity nightmare.

Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google usually allow users to use the old version of their more popular online products for a while after a new version is released. Lately, however, we have spoken to quite a few product managers who were quite adamant that their new product was so far superior to their old offering that they were planning to release it to all of their users without a roll-back option. Judging from the user reactions both Google and Yahoo saw over the weekend, it would seem that they do so at their own peril.

The current planned strike is being organized mainly over the Internet via social sites. A MySpace page for the strike has over 1900 friends, for example, while two Facebook groups (here and here) have over 5,000 members each. A Topix thread on the strike has over 4,800 replies, and a dedicated strike forum at TruckerForum -- a site with over a thousand members -- has 1,500 replies.

Unfortunately for protest organizers, who are aiming for May 5th as a potential strike day, as impressive as those numbers are on paper, they're not nearly large enough to effect the nation's shipping industry that much. If 75,000 truckers in 1994 didn't do much, a few thousand in 2008 won't have anyone calling for Congress to intervene.

But that said, in the past year we have begun to see movements that were started online take hold and have a serious impact. A protest organized on Facebook in Columbia a couple of months ago drew as many as 2 million people, and there is some evidence that the eBay protest organized via MySpace and YouTube in February had at least a small effect on the auction site.

What we're seeing over the past few months is the emergence of social networks as incredibly powerful organizational tools. Due to the inherently viral nature of most social networking sites, people are figuring out ways to leverage these networks to organize quickly on a massive scale and potentially effect real social change.