Alex Reid

“Student warning!” Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales tweeted on Monday. “Do your homework early. Wikipedia protesting bad law on Wednesday!”

The bad law is the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act and the backlash officially starts tomorrow. See here for more info.

Wikipedia’s decision to participate with a 24-hour blackout was a decision of the Wikipedia community, and intends to bring the lobby message to the masses.

News crowd sourcing site Reddit said they’ll go offline for 12 hours in protest, displaying a “simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit.”  Even Mozilla is planning to participate in the protest, replacing the content on its various sites with anti-SOPA messages.

Some called for Facebook and Google to join the blackout, saying their participation alone would kill the bill. Google has been a vocal opponent of SOPA/PIPA since the beginning. Google won’t blackout, but they will provide a link to some anti-SOPA information on its homepage.

Here’s the list of companies and organizations backing the bill.

New York artists Jason Eppink and Posterchild prompted their local government to fix a leaky pipe by building a small bridge over the sidewalk sludge.

Astoria Scum River Bridge project page

(Note that the media attention came after the agreement to fix it)

Organizers of the Plastic Pollution Coalition (PPC) pulled off a stunt this morning in Vancouver, strangling sculptures of fish and birds with gigantic plastic six pack rings to highlight pollution from plastics.

The PPC want to eliminate single use plastics and its impact on marine and wild life, pointing to the horrendous Great Pacific Garbage Patch as an example.

Special kudos go to award-winning Vancouver ad agency Rethink (they went national with a Toronto office just recently) which worked up the smart idea with the PPC.

The Federal government via MP Shelly Glover and the Province of Manitoba via Trade Minister Peter Bjornson have announced a shared funding boost of $1.8 million to Manitoba Music (which New Winnipeg Media is a corporate sponsor of) – a not-for-profit industry association designed to help local artists and companies market their music beyond Manitoba’s borders.

The money is part of a four-year plan under the Canada-Manitoba Western Economic Partnership Agreement (WEPA), in which both the Province of Manitoba and the Government of Canada are contributing $25 million each over four years to “to strengthen economic activity and improve the quality of life in western Canadian communities.”