For his “American Revolution Revolution” series, artist Shawn Huckins paints 18th century-style portraits with Internet slang superimposed on them (see the tweets and texts galleries).

via Hi-Fructose

Oh Internet, a heartwarming love song by Hannah Hart of My Drunk Kitchen, available on iTunes and Bandcamp.

Earlier this week, BBC public affairs program Panorama focused on the issue of Internet bullying in the episode “Hunting the Internet Bullies.” As part of the program, journalist Declan Lawn tracked down and confronted Internet troll Nimrod Severen, whose real name is Darren Burton. Nimrod Severen has gained notoriety by posting inflammatory and racist comments on social network tribute pages for people who have died.

via The Next Web

On January 17, a transatlantic conference call between investigators for the FBI and the UK’s Scotland Yard was compromised and recorded by Anonymous hackers. The subject of the call: the international criminal investigation into Anonymous. For more information, see The Guardian’s article on the hack.

via TPM Idea Lab

Writer and illustrator Rich Burlew has been writing The Order of the Stick, a comedic webcomic about D&D-style roleplaying games and medieval fantasy, for nearly 10 years. In addition to the online versions, Burlew has been self-publishing hard copy compilations for his fans. The third and largest anthology went out of print in 2010, so Burlew is turning to Kickstarter to raise funds for a second printing. As of this writing, he has raised $393,807, making his fundraiser one of the top 10 highest funded Kickstarter projects to date, and notably, the only book project in the top 10.

via The Beat

RePress is an anti-censorship plugin that allows anyone with a self-hosted WordPress site to uncensor a blocked website. The plugin turns the WordPress site into a proxy for the blocked website, rerouting traffic from a user, through the WordPress site, to the blocked website. RePress is under development by Dutch hosting company greenhost. It is currently available for download as an alpha release.

More and more governments from east and west are trying to censor the Internet. For different reasons the governments of countries like Iran, the USA, Syria, The Netherlands and China seek ways to block websites of the web and limit free speech. This plug-in will enable you to get those websites online again for you, your friends and the rest of the world without any hassle.

via Y Combinator Hacker News

Has Anyone Said This Shit? is a search engine for the many, many spin-off videos from the “Shit Girls Say” meme (the search engine has indexed more than 675 videos so far). The search engine was created by F.A.T. in collaboration with Lindsey Weber and Tanner Ringerud of BuzzFeed.

via F.A.T.

“To R.P. Salazar, with Love” is a short animation that tells the true story of how two strangers with very similar names (and nearly identical email addresses) fell in love after a misdirected email connected them. The animation was created by The Rauch Brothers and is part of the StoryCorps oral history preservation project.

In January 2007, Rachel P. Salazar and Ruben P. Salazar were living 9,000 miles apart and completely unaware of each other’s existence. But when an email meant for Rachel accidentally went to Ruben, it wasn’t long before an ordinary mistake began to look like an extraordinary stroke of luck.

See Previously: Animated 9/11 Stories Recorded by StoryCorps

via Neatorama

20 Things That Happened on the Internet in 2011, created by Peter Jaworowski of Ars Thanea for SYZYGY London.

See Previously: 20 Things That Happened on the Internet in 2010

via Fast Company Co.Design

Andrei Taraschuk and Aaron Ott created a fascinating visualization showing how people on Twitter reacted the Internet blackouts on January 18th in protest of SOPA and PIPA by mapping tweets mentioning #pipa #sopa and #blackout.

via Andrew Hyde

Urban Dictionary TV is a site that plays user-submitted videos for Urban Dictionary word definitions. It is a collaboration between Urban Dictionary and the VHX video platform.

via VHX

Image from: Where Do Your Members of Congress Stand on SOPA and PIPA?

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R, Texas), lead sponsor of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation, has issued a statement today saying that the United States House will delay their vote on the legislation.

The statement reads:

I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy. It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products.

The problem of online piracy is too big to ignore. American intellectual property industries provide 19m high-paying jobs and account for more than 60pc of US exports. The theft of America’s intellectual property costs the US economy more than $100bn annually and results in the loss of thousands of American jobs. Congress cannot stand by and do nothing while American innovators and job creators are under attack.

The online theft of American intellectual property is no different than the theft of products from a store. It is illegal and the law should be enforced both in the store and online.

The committee will continue work with both copyright owners and internet companies to develop proposals that combat online piracy and protect America’s intellectual property. We welcome input from all organisations and individuals who have an honest difference of opinion about how best to address this widespread problem. The committee remains committed to finding a solution to the problem of online piracy that protects American intellectual property and innovation.

The statement was issued after SOPA’s sister act, the Protect Intellectual Property Act of 2011 (PIPA), was indefinitely postponed by Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D, Nevada).

His statement reads:

In light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday’s vote on the PROTECT I.P. Act.

There is no reason that the legitimate issues raised by many about this bill cannot be resolved. Counterfeiting and piracy cost the American economy billions of dollars and thousands of jobs each year, with the movie industry alone supporting over 2.2 million jobs. We must take action to stop these illegal practices. We live in a country where people rightfully expect to be fairly compensated for a day’s work, whether that person is a miner in the high desert of Nevada, an independent band in New York City, or a union worker on the back lots of a California movie studio.

I admire the work that Chairman Leahy has put into this bill. I encourage him to continue engaging with all stakeholders to forge a balance between protecting Americans’ intellectual property, and maintaining openness and innovation on the internet. We made good progress through the discussions we’ve held in recent days, and I am optimistic that we can reach a compromise in the coming weeks.

image via ProPublica

Slacktory head honcho Nick Douglas goes meta with Shit People Say About Shit People Say Videos.

Internet writer and professor Clay Shirky recently presented Defend Our Freedom To Share or Why SOPA is a Bad Idea, a fascinating 12-minute TED Talk that is “a call to defend our freedom to create, discuss, link and share, rather than passively consume”. The speech was recorded at the TED offices on January 17, 2012.

With the English language version of Wikipedia blacked out to protest of SOPA and PIPA today, Twitter users have begun creating their own humorous “facts” and tagging them with #FactsWithoutWikipedia. Also be sure to check out our earlier post on @herpderpedia, the collection of tweets from upset people freaking out about Wikipedia’s SOPA/PIPA blackout collected by Nick Quaranto.

Thanks to Wendy Allen for the tip!

The Oatmeal has posted this alarming animated gif PSA alerting their readers to the problems with SOPA and PIPA.

The Joy of Tech on SOPA and PIPA

via The Daily What

Boing Boing managing editor Rob Beschizza explains why SOPA and PIPA are bad for the Internet on Al Jazeera.

via Xeni Jardin

The Day The LOLcats Died by Laugh Pong

via Cheezburger

The PBS Arts ongoing web documentary series titled Off Book, has released PBS Arts: Off Book – The Evolution of Music Online, a look at the ever-changing world of online music.

This episode features FADER co-founder Jon Cohen, Pitchfork senior editor Ryan Dombal, Vimeo’s VP of Creative Development Blake Whitman, and Hype Machine founder Anthony Volodkin.

As the 90s came to a close, the business of music began to change profoundly. New technology allowed artists to record and produce their own music and music videos, and the internet became a free-for-all distribution platform for musicians to promote themselves to audiences across the world. The result was a massive influx of artists onto the cultural scene, and audiences were left wondering how to sort through them all. In this episode we discuss these massive changes, and reveal how music blogs and websites have arisen as the new arbiters of quality.

image via PBS Arts

“Search by Image, Recursively, Transparent PNG, #1″ by German artist Sebastian Schmieg is a mesmerizing algorithm-generated video created with Google’s Search by Image service. The video is part of Schmieg’s Search by Image series.

via MetaFilter

reddit co-founder and highly-successful entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian is authoring his first book tentatively titled Without Your Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made – Not Managed. The book, due to release in 2013, will be aimed at “aspiring entrepreneurs eager to embrace the future of the World Wide Web for fun, profit, and for the good of humankind”.

CNN recently wrote about the development of the book:

The book will combine advice for building successful startup ventures and marketing secrets with examples of heartwarming stories about using the Internet for grass-roots campaigns. It will also include doodles, which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising coming from the man who designed the logos for Breadpig, Hipmunk and reddit.

photo by Scott Beale

In December, we posted about the comedic YouTube videos series “Shit Girls Say,” which is based on a Twitter account of the same name. Well, Shit Girls Say is now a full-on Internet meme with a plethora of derivative videos: “Shit Black Girls Say,” & “Shit White Girls Say…to Black Girls,” & “Shit Asian Girls Say” are some of the more popular spinoffs.

“The Importance of DNS” is a short educational animation about the history and importance of the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS), the system responsible for translating numerical IP addresses into human-friendly domain names like laughingsquid.com. The video was made by DNS Made Easy.

Proving again that the internet is made of cats, Tomomi Imura has combined HTTP status codes with familiar cat images in her HTTP Status Cats series. For example, the image of the bobcat sitting on a cactus is amusingly paired with the “502 Bad Gateway” message. If you have a cat/code mashup that needs to be made, send Tomomi a tweet with your idea.

via Boing Boing