Another group preaching to their choir. We need facebook, twitter, google, and wikipedia to do this. Reddit, Hackernews, and Identica are filled with technical people that have been fighting SOPA for a while. Need to shock people that don't know what SOPA is and show them what the internet censored is like.
and Identica are filled with technical people that have been fighting SOPA for a while
Source? See, just cuz we techies know about SOPA does not mean we are fighting it. It takes a lot of repetition for messages to stick, even to people who generally agree with it. This is why ads are repeated a gazillion times: because knowing and taking action on that knowledge are very different things.
I am a perfect example. Initially when this uproar started, I was like "wow, big deal." I brushed it off. Since, I've been getting hit with SOPA-related stuff all the time...and increasingly, I am getting more passionate about it. And yet, I don't think I have really done much! I haven't gotten on the phone to tell my Dad about it. I haven't reached out to my Congressman. I haven't tried to educate my own facebook fans about it. There are thousands and thousands like me: techies, informed about SOPA, and yet mostly passive until a certain tipping point. These blackouts by so-called tech sites help put us techies over the tipping point. And thousands of techies at work can help put the general public over the tipping point.
Of course I was speaking in generalities because these sites tailor to the tech community. Every single effort helps but the user base here has a lot of coverage already. We really need to get the big tech companies to put the general public out of their comfort zones.
I can't delete or edit my (now downvoted) parent comment, but the reason it exists is that GP originally said something like "preaching to a crowd" instead of "preaching to the the choir."
My main website that gets a whopping 200 unique visitors a day has already been blacked out and will remain so until Obama signs the damn bill. I provide a message about why I did it and links to fight it. I already lose money on hosting so a few weeks of lost revenue don't really matter.
If one person takes action and learns and contacts their representatives due to the blackout I did my job.
