Stop Online Piracy Act is Working

The Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA bill announced last year in 2011 was proposed to counter online piracy and apparently, help people keep their jobs. However, announcement of postponing the bill came in January 2012 due to the mounting pressure by the Internet powers – Wikipedia and WordPress to name a few.

All is well but not ends well

Though the SOPA bill may not have been passed, authorities have rained down on 1 of the biggest file sharing websites; Megaupload. It has forced the file sharing service to shut down its operations with follow up arrests of its management and founders.

And the ripple effect ensued. Here’s some quick updates thanks to LowYat members.

FileServe – No longer renewing/selling premium accounts.

FileJungle – Deleting files. Locked in the US.

UploadStation – Locked in the US.

FileSonic – News is arbitrary (under FBI investigation).

VideoBB – Closed. May disappear soon.

Uploaded – Banned in US and FBI went after the disappeared owners.

FilePost – Deleting all materials but will maintain executables, PDFs and TXT files.

Videoz – Closed and locked in the countries affiliated with the US.

4shared – Deleting files with copyright and waits in line at the FBI.

MediaFire – Called to testify in the next 90 days and it will open doors to the FBI.

Org torrent – Could vanish with everything within 30 days as “he is under criminal investigation”

Network Share mIRC – Awaiting the decision of the case to continue or terminate everything.

Where Malaysia stands in all of this?

The Internet community here as well weren’t too happy about SOPA and people were talking about it.

the fall of file sharing sites; now there is no reason to get UNIFI

So what I’m now interested in is will the above ripples affect the broadband user signup rate. Especially services currently pushing fibre to the home.

The Wedding Meme Proposal

It appeared on MSNBC, CBS News, Huffington Post, Gizmodo, Mashable, MSN Malaysia, Yahoo Taiwan and some other big time online press. Seriously, it was a real viral story never expected to happen. And when it went viral, it really went viral. No nonsense listening from a person who tell you it’ll go viral. This just did it, because it was worth sharing.

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Congratulations to Timothy aka BossStewie and Audrey aka Fourfeetnine.

P1 Delivers One Plan Giftpack Right To The Doorstep This Festive Season For Online & Call-In Orders

Petaling Jaya – This festive and New Year season, give the gift of a better indoor and outdoor broadband experience in one special gift pack by Packet One Networks (Malaysia) Sdn.Bhd. (“P1”), Malaysia’s first and leading 4G wireless broadband service provider. The ONE Plan^TM is already a value buy as it comes with two modems for home and on-the-go at the price of one broadband subscription. For this festive and New Year season, P1 offers an online and call-in exclusive with a special gift pack delivered right to your doorstep and a further RM100 discount off activation fee.

The 2-in-1 home and on-the-go One Plan^TM is designed to provide a better indoor and outdoor broadband experience facilitating the user with the right modem in the right environment. There are four different packages for the P1 One Plan^TM to serve different user requirements in terms of speed, quota and price; they are the One 69 Plan, One 89 Plan, One 129 Plan and the One 169 Plan.

The lowest One Plan^TM for light users is the ONE 69 Plan which offers speeds of 1 Mbps for both modems and a shared quota of 3GB. It also includes 100 minutes of free voice calls to local fixed and mobile numbers and IDD calls to 10 popular destinations including Singapore, China and Hong Kong.

Online and call-in customers also get to enjoy the current year-end promotion for the One 69 Plan and One 89 Plan which comes with additional RM20 off for the first three months: This means customers pay only RM49 and RM69 respectively in the first three months. This offers ends 31 December 2011.

Consumers interested in the special One Plan^TM giftpack can purchase or find out more on www.p1.com.my/oneplan/star or by calling 1300 03 8887.

Why ChurpChurp stories are not on the homepage?

I wrote a short review of the new ChurpChurp redesign recently and one of its new features was the Stories. My first impression of this was that it would’ve been like Project Petaling Street. But I found out otherwise.

While ChurpChurp is running a contest to spread the awareness of their Stories feature, I’ve discovered all stories you find on the homepage are featured stories hand-picked by the ChurpChurp team.

If you don’t see the stories you shared appear on the homepage, it’s because it wasn’t virally worth being featured – like the 5 stories I had shared. Through my conversation with ChurpChurp over Twitter, all my stories were kept in my profile – for what purpose, I can’t tell.

Truth be told, I’m not happy now after learning only virally worth stories which are hand-picked by the ChurpChurp team would be featured on the homepage. This could be its Achilles heel.

Let the rakyat (public) decide

I’m not sure if the ChurpChurp team are aware of this – I believe their techies would be. But there are existing community websites who’ve implemented a self-moderating method. Through the power of the community, they vote up what is worth sharing and vote down or report abuses.

Oh well, I guess the team would look into this in their next redesign.

Website Review: Churp Churp Redesign

Before I start talking about the new ChurpChurp website, here’s a trick question to the Churpers or even, Nuffies working in ChurpChurp office.

How many times have the ChurpChurp website been redesigned?

5? 10? 1? 3? Well, jump into the time machine thanks to Archive.org and let me show you some of ChurpChurp’s older website designs.

Back then everything was kind of flat. And gloomy? Probably because of the darker hues.

It started to look more pleasant thanks to the lighter hues. Then in that white empty box was where you’d see a Slideshare about ChurpChurp and what it was offering to publishers.

But the redesign didn’t end there.

I’d say this was the most drastic redesign from the previous. The content area was revamped and the focus began moving into campaign sharing. Even the inside of ChurpChurp was streamlined for publishers to access their paid campaigns. In addition, this was the redesign when ChurpChurp’s team implemented the sign in using Facebook.

Then finally, approaching the end of 2011, ChurpChurp’s team introduces a new website design.

The newly designed ChurpChurp to me is a much cleaner and organized website now. No more feeling of my eyeballs jumping from corner to corner scanning the website. Though like any redesign, they’d still have quirks to think about.

Double sign in with Facebook and Twitter buttons

Maybe they’re trying to save bandwidth. But they seriously should create another button for the sign in with Facebook and Twitter. Just having the header say Sign Up isn’t the same as the button reading; Sign up with Facebook.

Responsive web design for the win

Hell yeah! Great effort from ChurpChurp’s team implementing this to the new website. And if you didn’t know, responsive web design is basically optimizing a website’s layout to the screen resolution. Here’s an example of it on ChurpChurp.

The screenshot on the left is my browser resolution at 1024 x 768 and the right is what you would see when viewed on your iPhone in portrait – works in landscape too.

The first screenshot of the new website above is for resolutions larger than 1024 x 768. My browser resolution was at 1680 x 1050 for that view.

For a deeper yet clear explanation about responsive web design, have a read through this article by Smashing Magazine.

Share it like it’s Facebook

One of the interesting additions to this new rendition is the story exploration. Think of WordPress.com and Facebook combined. In WordPress.com it encourages other publishers to read featured blogs.

Like Facebook, when you post a link, it’ll also try to retrieve the first image of the post. Thinking about it, I’m wondering if this is powered by Facebook. Or, did the ChurpChurp technical team manage to come up with a similar script. Hmm…

Hashtag it like a #churp

Honestly, this was a feature I never knew existed and I wonder if it works and how will it work.

Apparently, all I have to do is tweet with a link and hashtag it as #churp for it to be posted under ChurpChurp’s stories. Please do let me know if you successfully did it. I’m also going to experiment with this.

Now I’m not sure if it’s because this feature is new, but I believe most of the posts in Stories are right now by the Nuffies. And I’m wondering, how does this compliment their other blog aggregator; Innit?

So, what’s next?

Well, ChurpChurp definitely needs to look through their responsive web design again because it’s not there yet to me. Other than that, maybe Timothy and Ming should look at integrating all the services closer – Nuffnang, ChurpChurp and Jipaban. As right now, each of it stands on its own. But hey, that’s just me living in my spaced out world.