When it came to battling SOPA and PIPA, Reddit was on the front lines. Considering Reddit was the first to announce an anti-SOPA blackout and was responsible for calling attention to anti-SOPA and anti-PIPA petitions that the White House was ultimately forced to acknowledge, it’s no surprise that Redditors are itching not only to defend the Internet, but also for a new challenge. That’s why they’re trying their hands at something really ambitious: Crowdsourced legislation.

A mere 19 hours ago, shocking photos of a man named Omari were posted to Reddit. Omari had just been released from the hospital after having his face slashed by roving thugs while single-handedly defending the Faraja Orphanage in Ngong, Kenya. The original post asked for $2,000 to help build a security wall around the orphanage. Since then, the collective power of the Internet has raised some $70,000. Wowie zowie, Internet!

It should come as no surprise that SOPA has come back off its proverbial “shelf” but feel free to be surprised that it came back so fast. A mere 4 days after announcing he was dropping the DNS blocking provisions of the bill and putting it on the shelf until a “consensus” was reached, Representative Lamar Smith has brought SOPA back out to play, and just in time for the January 18th SOPA blackouts.

In protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, a nefarious act that tries to censor the Internet without actually showing much understanding of said Internet in the first place, reddit, one of the most popular social news aggregation currently on the very same Internet, will black itself out next week. Redditors may not know what to do with themselves, but on January 18, a week from today, from 8 AM to 8 PM EST, reddit will be blacked out in protest.

Instead of the normal reddit feed, the site will display a “simple message” regarding how the SOPA and PIPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit itself.

Before you read any of this, just watch the video above for a little bit and see if you can wrap your head around it. It took me a while to get it. OK, so this video was filmed underwater at Saarijärvi in Vaala, Finland, where the stars stood upside-down on the underwater surface of the ice and mimicked fishing while using air as water. Crazy, right?

When GoDaddy‘s public and unapologetic pro-SOPA stance initially came to light, the backlash was big enough that GoDaddy backed off its “support” to something a little more lukewarm and moved to “not supporting SOPA,” but dancing around the issue more than actually opposing SOPA. Now, GoDaddy has come full circle and claims to oppose SOPA in an about-face that has occurred at a pretty staggering speed: 1 week. The cause of this speed is doubtlessly because of the loud voices, particularly those of reddit, railing against the registrar nonstop, calling for a boycott, and advocating the transfer of domains. Their efforts seem to have worked, although the boycott itself may not be as responsible for the change as we all might like to think.

For the most part, the technically-inclined world is against SOPA and it seems that only big businesses like Viacom and Universal Music Group are for it. There is one strange exception though: GoDaddy. After customers started asking about the company’s position, GoDaddy came out with this statement, one of the few arguments for SOPA. Needless to say, this has a lot of people upset, the kind of people who have a number of domains, the kind of people who are now calling for a boycott.

A couple of months ago, we Geekolinked a thread on reddit asking if one could destroy the entire Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus if one traveled back in time with a modern U.S. Marine infantry battalion. The thread was (and still is) very fun, and it turns out, it was fun enough for Warner Bros. to preemptively buy the pitch, Rome, Sweet Rome. The movie will follow marines as they are transported into the past, where they encounter one of the world’s most legendary villains, which in turn causes them to disrupt history. In order to return home, they have to set things right and put history back the way it was.

Adam Kolbrenner of Madhouse Entertainment caught James Erwin’s, the writer of Rome, Sweet Rome, well-thought out responses on the reddit thread, and contacted him to begin working on the concept. When the project was in shape, Kolbrenner brought it to executive Chris Gary, who encouraged Warner Bros. to pick it up, and pick it up they did.

User-submitted content aggregators are a fairly popular method of creating a cohesive community out of scratch. From the olden days of newsgroups, to Slashdot, to Digg before the fall, allowing users to find or create their own content and submit it at their leisure can end up creating a surprisingly informed community with lightning-fast updates. Of course, that can also lead to a bunch of superfluous garbage, but a few communities out there are able to surpass that hurdle. More often than not, reddit tends to be one of the few examples of a user-submitted content aggregating community. If you aren’t hip to reddit yet, or are the hippest of cool cats but want to brush up on your history, Sortable created an informative infographic full of information and graphics just for you, seen below the break.

In 2006, popular social news website Reddit was purchased by publishing giant Condé Nast where it grew into the juggernaut we know and love. Today, Reddit announced that it had declared independence and was being spun off into Reddit Inc.

Though Reddit is now separate from Condé Nast, it is still wholly owned by Condé Nast’s parent company Advanced Publishing. However, Reddit will now be operated by a board of directors. According to the site’s official blog, the board will consist of:

…reddit co-founder Alexis (kn0thing) Ohanian (read his thoughts here) will serve on that board, along with Bob Sauerberg (President) and Joe Simon (Chief Technology Officer) from Condé Nast, and Andrew Siegel (Senior Vice President, Strategy and Corporate Development) from Advance. Other internal or external directors may be added in the future.

Reddit Inc. has also begun a search for a CEO to head the company. There is currently no word on what factors will enter into that search, or how much karma candidates are expected to have.