This week in Online Office Hours, we’re looking at Google Places, Google’s local search and business directory. It’s a valuable tool for any business or organization that has a local clientele, and it’s easy to use. We’ll talk about how to verify your listing, what to include in it, and how to encourage your patrons to post reviews.

Online Office Hours webinars are free, but you need to register online. Sign up now for tomorrow’s session, and while you’re thinking about it you might also join our mailing list to get reminders of upcoming webinars via email.

This week in Online Office Hours, I’ll talk about the fundamentals of search engine optimization — organic search versus paid search, what PageRank is, what matters to search engines and what doesn’t, simple steps to make your website friendly for search engines, and more.

This will be an entry-level discussion. If search engines are a mystery to you, this will be a good start to unraveling that mystery. And if you know a bit about SEO but have a specific question, we’ll have time to discuss that as well.

Online Office Hours webinars are free, but you need to register online. Sign up now for tomorrow’s session, and while you’re thinking about it you might also join our mailing list to get reminders of upcoming webinars via email.

“The scary bit of legalese here is the idea that the law would apply not just to actual copyright violations (the nominal goal of the law) but to any site that was “facilitating the activities” of copyright infringement, a term nowhere defined but vague enough to include mentioning the existence of such sites, which is enough to make them findable. Like a fast-spreading virus, the proposed censorship moves outwards from the domain name system, to include any source of public web content in the US.

“If the phrase “any source of public web content” seems like a dry detail, substitute the name of your favourite web publisher: you.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/18/sopa-pipa-consumption-only-internet?CMP=twt_gu

As you may know, there have been two bills proposed in the U.S. Congress to combat online piracy. One, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” or SOPA, was proposed in the Senate; it has been tabled. The second, the “Protect Intellectual Property Act” or PIPA or PROTECT_IP, remains under consideration in the House and will come up for a vote later this month.

This is a bad piece of legislation. As written, it fails to create tools that will meet its goals and it creates a too-easy way for anyone to block websites, effectively creating a powerful form of censorship. Even the White House opposes it.

The video below eloquently explains what the bill intends to do, why it fails, and why it would be a terrible thing for the Internet and society.

A number of websites, including Wikipedia and Reddit, will be protesting this bill on Wednesday, January 18, 2012 by going dark — that is, by taking their content completely offline.

Big Big Design will be joining this protest in a modified form: When you visit this site on Wednesday, you’ll see the screen in the image above. You can click anywhere to move ahead and access the site, but I hope that people will also click the information links provided to learn more about these proposed bills and how they will affect us all. I’ll be doing the same with my personal blog (My Brilliant Mistakes), Pittsburgh Bloggers, and other sites we run.

If you have a WordPress site, you can install a plugin that will blackout your site the same way. Click here to see it in action, and to find a link to the plugin download.

Big Big Web clients can activate this plugin on their sites — it’s available right now. We’ll also install and activate the plugin for any Big Big Design client free of charge. Just send me an email.

There’s also a Facebook protest planned.

I hope you’ll join me in protesting the legislation via your website or Facebook, contacting your Congressperson to express your views, or telling everyone you know what’s going on and why they should care.

“The little sites are fighting back with some tactics of their own, like preventing price comparisons or offering freebies that an anonymous large site can’t. And in a new twist, they are also exploiting the sympathies of shoppers like Dr. Pollack by encouraging customers to think of them as the digital version of a mom-and-pop shop facing off against Walmart: If you can’t shop close to home, at least shop small.”

From “Online Shoppers Are Rooting for the Little Guy,” by Stephanie Clifford and Claire Cain Miller, New York Times, 1/16/2012.

Each Wednesday at 11am EST, I’ll hold a short webinar to share new ideas and information, and to answer your questions about issues on the web.

For our first session, the key topic will be how to make the most of new features in WordPress — primarily WordPress 3.3.

The great bit about Online Office Hours, though, is that it’s adaptable to the needs of the participants. If everyone is all caught up on WordPress’s new stuff and wants to spend the time talking about, say, Facebook’s rules for holding giveaways and promotions, we’ll switch gears and do that. (Most likely, we’ll do a bit of both.)

These webinars are FREE to attend and you don’t need any special equipment to participate — any computer with an up-to-date web browser will do.

But you do need to register ahead of time. Register for the first one by clicking right here:
Wed, Jan 11, 2012 11:00 AM – 11:30 AM EST
Topic: What’s new in WordPress 3.3.1

And check out the upcoming OOH! sessions on our Webinars page.

Have a question or topic you’d like us to cover this week or in an upcoming Online Office Hours session? Send it in.

(Did you know? WP release 3.3 is code named “Sonny” in honor of jazz great Sonny Stitt, pictured above in a photo by Tom Marcello.)