Revision3, the Internet TV network, posted some hefty numbers to cap off its successful 2011.

While its flagship show Diggnation decided to end its run, the company added a myriad of YouTube talent to its stables last year including shows like Epic Meal Time, The Philip DeFranco Show, Film State, Soldier Knows Best, TechnoBuffalo, Ty’s iHelp and Nixie Pixel.

Revision3 was able to expand its revenue 53% year over year thanks to advertising from big players like Ford, Doritos, EA, Verizon, Sony, T-Mobile, Citrix, Gamestop, HTC, About.Me and Samsung.

Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback had this to say about its strong 2011:

We had another amazing year in 2011, and are looking forward to a strong 2012 with our content available anywhere and everywhere. By working with incredibly talented content creators, we have been building a stable of shows that deliver audience numbers as big, or bigger, than most cable shows. And as we look at the web video space, we continue to be the only company that monetizes web-original video at or above traditional television rates, with a current average yield per view of more than $30.

With 2011 behind Revision3, the company started off 2012 with a week that saw 9 million views during its original CES coverage. By sprinkling in over 200 pieces from the Las Vegas show into its programming, the company was able to do what it does best, which is advertising and product placement.

In addition to strong revenue and viewership, the company also deployed a video player completely in HTML5 that has helped them grow on tablets and the iOS platform, which doesn’t support flash. The company clearly understands that distributing its content with ads in place is the way to go, and Revision3 can be found on a ton of devices thanks to apps for Google TV and Roku.

Today, we wrote about a phone call made by New York entrepeneur Amanda Peyton due to her concerns about the proposed PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). She called the office of her local Senator, Chuck Schumer and asked questions about why Schumer was supporting PIPA.

During that call, Peyton claimed to have gotten a shocking response to her question:

The first question I asked was “why does the Senator support this legislation?”

The guy on the other end of the phone said: “well, he’s a co-sponsor so he’s not changing his position.”

He must have known why I was calling.

Asked the same question again. This time the reply I got this time was different: “Senator Schumer is in favor of censoring the Internet.”

Senator Schumer’s representatives reached out to us with a statement denying that the Senator is in favor of censoring the Internet, as Peyton claims she was told on the phone.

Spokesperson Mike Morey had this to say:

It is absurd to suggest that Sen. Schumer, who led the charge against the assault on net neutrality, would support censoring the Internet; he unequivocally does not.

The statement doesn’t call out Amanda Peyton personally, but states that the idea of the Senator supporting censorship on the web is not the case. Either she heard something that wasn’t said, or the person who said it should find other work. I imagine that the phones were ringing off the hook at Schumer’s office today about this.

During a speech last night, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore made his feelings known about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). During a question and answer session with the audience, Gore said:

In our world today there is hardly anything more important than to save and protect the vibrancy and freedom of the Internet.

The Internet is bringing life back to democracy.

We’re glad that Al Gore is against the act the endangers sites allowing content to be posted by users. He did invent the Internet, after all. Ok, he didn’t actually invent the Internet, but in 1999 he did say this to CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer:

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

Here’s Gore defending his precious invention:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHQhMEIH16U

As you know, SOPA has been quite a hot topic on the Internet over the past few weeks, with Anonymous threatening Sony over its support of the act, and Reddit calling for a war against congress. At least Gore has our back.

Not sure what SOPA is all about? Read “SOPA For Dummies“

UPDATE: Unfortunately, this video has been removed by the user who uploaded it and we’re looking into it.

As you know, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) jeopardizes the way we use the Internet today, and could halt innovation that we’ve enjoyed on the web since its inception.

One of those who benefitted from the web as we know it is Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian. Reddit has become one of the most popular, and sometimes controversial, social networks on the net.

To speak his mind about SOPA, Ohanian is currently hosting a live telethon to discuss what the act will do to our rights, as well as drive more phone calls and emails to those in Congress, to put the act to a halt. He’ll also be commenting live on the House Judiciary Committee hearing on SOPA.

Oharian had this to say about the Stop Online Piracy Act:

This legislation affects my entire industry and livelihood. We never would’ve been able to start Reddit if SOPA were the law, and I worry about all of the future innovation we’d miss out on if it were to pass. And I have no idea what I’d do with myself.

You can watch the live telethon here, and tweet with the hashtags #sopatelethon and #sopa to have your voice heard.

If congress passes the Stop Online Piracy Act, one corner of the web feels like the future of jobs and opportunities thanks to innovation on the web could come to a standstill.

IWorkForTheInternet.org is letting web developers and business owners come together to share their feelings about SOPA.

Here’s what the site, that comes via Fight For the Future, says about the movement:

America’s most promising engine of future jobs and opportunity will be put at risk. Don’t stop us now — we’re just getting started! Tell the world you work for the Internet.

If you agree, you can add yourself to the growing list of the web’s finest to fight an act that could leave a lot of people without jobs.

Sarcasm and the Internet go hand in hand. You certainly can’t have one without the other. But for so long, we’ve had to express our sarcasm with weird tags and fonts, which made being sarcastic such a chore.

That all stops now, thanks to the creators of “Sarcastic Font”, which is italics, but in reverse. Simply genius! Here is their manifesto to support the need for a sarcasm font:

For too long e-mails, instant messages, web pages and documents have been unable to fully communicate the subtleties of sarcasm. Text delivered without intonation fail to represent the rare form of language where the intended meaning is the opposite of the written word.

Over the internet we yell at each other with ALL CAPS and emphasize with bold and italics, but where is sarcasm? Where is the nuance, the elegance? We say it is time for a change. It’s time for a revolution. It’s time for a new font style!

What would that look like? Have a gander at “Ariel Sarcasm”:

Now, it’s not easy to get the world to adopt a font. Millions would have to install and use it to gain traction, but how many times have you been sarcastic in an email and the recipient just flat out doesn’t get it?

Happens all of the time.

Usage Guide

As with any font, there should be a guide on how to use it. Luckily, there’s one for the Sarcastic Font:

• Use to your own natural level of sarcasm. (note that a sharp rise in the use of sarcasm may change one’s circle of friends)
• Unless you’re writing a long sarcastic rant, it’s most effective to highlight a phrase or two in a sarcastic font than to write an entire note in it.
• Bold a sarcastic font for really sarcastic comments.
• A sarcastic font is especially useful when writing to others in a foreign language. They may not understand what you’re saying, but they’ll know it’s sarcastic.

Check out the website and install the early versions of the Sarcastic Font. Be sure to tell all of your friends about it too, so they know that you’re being sarcastic. Not about the font though, that’s real. We think.

The internet is becoming more and more of a place to mobilize charitable efforts. In the recent years, I’ve seen many campaigns raise quite a bit of awareness and money for causes.

One organization who has been at the forefront of the Social Good movement is charity:water. With events all over the world, and campaigns on Twitter, the foundation has raised awareness and money for the over one billion people in the world who don’t have access to clean drinking water.

Its latest movement “WaterForward“, takes the awareness and fundraising to the next level.

Today, I saw a post on my Facebook wall from a friend who donated $10 in my name to charity:water. This donation added me to an online “book” that WaterForward is compiling.

It is really quite genius. Organizations have let you donate money in the names of others for years, but to be able to pull it all together with your social graph on Facebook and Twitter is quite powerful.

Here is a video explaining the WaterForward efforts:

Donating to a charitable cause like charity:water is a good thing to do, but involving your friends in a positive and inspiring way makes the campaign even better. The WaterForward movement wants to leverage the almost one billion people on Facebook who may have access to drinking water into giving money to the billion who don’t.

As of the time of publishing, WaterForward has 12,808 people in its book, and has raised $128,080 for clean water. Get involved today!

Sharing on the web is something that we all do. Be it sharing a link on Twitter or Recommending something on Facebook, it’s something we do everyday. This is great for our friends and family, as they are seeing content that they probably wouldn’t have stumbled onto themselves. But I’m going to ask the question that nobody seems to be asking.

What’s in it for us?

Asking what we’re getting out of sharing may sound selfish. In fact, getting something in return for sharing sounds downright wrong. However, with as much time that we spend on the web curating, digging, and finding great content to share with others, we actually deserve something significant in return.

But what?

Yes, we’re getting to meet new people and keep in contact with people that we care about, and that’s very important. I’m asking a very different question though. When we share something on the web, we don’t think about the effect that it has on others. Sure, someone can retweet us, favorite our post, or like something, but that doesn’t really give us the feedback we need when we’re putting in the time to say “Hey, this is cool!”. I’m not going to focus on whether we’ll get paid for sharing, because that’s a whole different topic. I personally worry about what I’ll be able to get out of the content that I’ve shared five or ten years from now. How about when I have kids? Will I be able to show them exactly what I was checking out on November 7th, 2007? It’s not looking so bright for that so far.

I’m going to discuss how the most popular services are going about giving us something back for what we’re putting into it. Or more specifically, how these services are going about personal aggregation and analytics.

Facebook

Facebook just made the first big step in personal aggregation with its Timeline feature. It’s not publicly available yet, but it’s going to change the way we use Facebook completely. When I visit your profile, I could view things that you posted in 2008. That may sound like stalking, but really what it does is let me see how you and your tastes have evolved over the years. For example, you may have listened to a lot of Dave Matthews Band in 2008, but now you’re more of a John Mayer fan. Until Timeline, you’d have to click a “more” button over and over to go through someone’s Wall posts on Facebook. What a bad experience.

For me personally, this type of aggregation is exciting. I am really excited to remember the places I’ve been and the things that I said in the context of months and years. That’s really what Facebook was missing before Timeline, the context. A lot of other services are missing that too.

Twitter

Twitter is probably my favorite service to use. I have tweeted some of the most important milestones and moments of my life. I was using Twitter before it launched, and certainly before it went mainstream. Can I search for those tweets? No. That to me is nearly data robbery. I feel like I’ve put so much effort into Twitter for myself and for others, yet I can’t reference any of it. Twitter search only makes the last 5-7 days worth of tweets available. I can however go through my tweets by infinitely scrolling through them. Like Facebook’s wall before Timeline, that is a horrible user experience.

Twitter tells me who my followers are, who I follow, and how many times I’ve tweeted, yet leaves out all other context about what’s most important…the actual tweets. Sure, I can favorite tweets, including my own, but that’s a lot to ask.

I want to see my tweets in a timeline, I don’t want to have to work hard to browse through them. In a second I want to see what I tweeted 2 years ago today. I think we deserve that much, especially since Twitter is starting to monetize the service. For as much funding as they have, they certainly don’t seem to be putting in a lot of work into user interface and experience. Relying on third parties for these types of features won’t work, since Twitter has choked companies usage of its API.

Google+

Google+ is the new kid in town, and like all of Google’s products, it’s driven by search. That’s actually a way better experience than Twitter right now. But again, there is no interface or visualization of what I’m posting, who has shared it, and how much activity certain things have generated. Google+ has released a read-only API, so maybe some developers will build great features outside of the service itself.

The thing that worries me about this is that third-party services rarely get popular with people other than geeks. People tend to trust the main company and product, and use only what they’re given. It’s only really curious geeks and nerds who go digging for a new experience by way of a third-party. Perhaps Google+ will have an App Store like Facebook has when it launches Open Graph, so that users can find the experiences and visualizations that they want, without having to leave Google+.

FourSquare

What excited me the most about FourSquare wasn’t becoming the mayor of a venue or checking in with all of my friends. It was storing the information about where I’ve been and what I’ve done for years to come. I personally travel a lot and visit a lot of bars, restaurants, and venues. I simply can’t remember everywhere that I’ve been. FourSquare actually does an amazing job at showing you in a visual way what you’ve done and where you’ve been over the years. Unfortunately, most of this is shown on their website, which most people don’t use. Luckily, the company is weaving this data into their app more and more, showing you how many different coffee shops you’ve been to, for example.

Parents tell their kids stories about where they were on this day or that day, but generations to come are inquisitive and want the information to be completely accurate. Accurate information being readily available is essential to the future of our own personal family legacies. Imagine knowing what your Grandfather was doing and where he was in 1965, along with a photo. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who wouldn’t want to know that.

Delicious, Utopic, and bookmarking services

Bookmarking services tend to perpetuate the problem of sharing into the ether. Those services want to make it super easy for you to share and share and share, so that they can collect the best content on the web. Sure, it’s great that you can go back and reference all of the cool things you’ve found, but that’s not enough. The context of why you shared something is lost, and a “note” feature isn’t going to do it. Entering notes is boring and nobody does it. I want the things that I bookmark to be surrounded with other context, like what other things I’m doing on my computer at the time.

Things are moving fast, and it’s a real-time and instant gratification society. We’re all caught up in the world wide web and we continue to weave this web by sharing, retweeting, liking, and recommending content.

At the end of the day though, what are we going to get out of it? The internet is our digital scrapbook, after all.

I’m not asking for a paycheck or a thank you, but I think it would be nice if these important companies with a lot of funding would start thinking longer term for its users. I’ve used Twitter for over six years, Facebook for just as long, and FourSquare a few years as well. I’ve put a lot of time and energy into making sure I’ve shared and tracked all of the things that were important to me in the moment. These companies are starting to figure out how to make money on all of the things that we say and share.

It’s these services turn to remind us of why we do it in the first place.

Before you read this, take a couple of minutes to assess the things that you do or the products that you use that require you to use the Internet to either function or even exist. If you, like me, suddenly realise how much you rely on the Internet, would you be able to be as productive or get tasks finished if you suddenly didn’t have all that connectivity at your fingertips?

Writing for The Next Web, I spend at least nine hours a day browsing the Internet; whether its for research or for chatting with my co-workers, I am never far away from a Google search or a website which could possibly help me publish the next big breaking story. Due to the nature of my job, my usage is extreme, I write about the Internet so I guess it’s accepted that I would spend that much time using it.

But what happens when I finish for the day? When the lid of my MacBook Pro closes, I instantly look to interact with my children in the hours before their bedtime, where time is spent finding ways to ensure they are learning whilst having fun. Playing with toys, play-fighting and reading books all manage to keep my little ones entertained but nothing can hold my children’s attention like my MacBook Pro or my iPhone. A quick YouTube search for a children’s show or the download of an app that plays animal sounds and my eldest would take himself off to interact with whatever was playing or launching at that time.

The kids go to bed and the wife and I turn on the television to catch up with the programme we missed the night before. Hitting the “TV on Demand” option on my television menu, my TV connects to BBC iPlayer and streams the content back to me, whilst my iPhone beeps to the sound of an incoming email.

Despite stepping away from my computer earlier, I’ve used the Internet to download applications for my son, used it to stream the television programme I missed last night and I’ve just received an email that my Amazon order is on its way. Thinking about it, I’ve used it nearly every hour of my waking day.

It’s the same for millions of people around the world – but is this a good or bad thing?

Are We Addicted?

With access at work, on our smartphones, televisions and laptops, the Internet has laid the foundations for things that we take for granted every single day.

The problem with having connectivity wherever you are is that you often remain contactable, even if you don’t want to be. Phone calls and text messages have been replaced with Facebook and Twitter messages, we can even Skype from our smartphones and contact our friends and family for free, no matter where they are in the world.

The benefits are huge, but the disadvantages are numerous also.

How often have you been in a restaurant and checked your mobile phone for new tweets, Facebook Wall posts or emails? You know you have seen the couple at the table by the window sitting there staring at their smartphones rather than speak to each other.

There might be deeper issues as to why there’s a lack of conversation, but with the mobile Internet keeping us a swipe or screen press away from all of our favourite social networks, messaging apps and photo sharing services, you could say we are being distracted by the virtual services that the Internet can make available to us.

Would You Be Smarter Without It?

The New York Times bestselling author, consultant, and speaker Julien Smith believes our brains are not wired to be made happy by the Internet:

Our emotions, like fear and joy, are based in a primal understanding of the world. This is something we can’t escape.

Saying the web is important to your life is like saying that television is important. It might be social, sure, but it’s still media. It can help connect but it also divides in a very fundamental way.

Touching a screen isn’t the same as touching a person.

The best stuff happens outside the web. Outside is new and frightening, not comfortable. Encountering pain helps transform your vision of yourself and forces you to grow.

And there is very little that is new and frightening on the web. The biggest realizations happen when you are in free-fall, not when you have a safety net.

It’s an interesting point but a little presumptuous that Internet users aren’t using the Internet to be more social or researching something that might be new and frightening to them.

However, with audio, images and video readily available and almost never destroyed, many users have become desensitised by what they see and read online.

Adult websites have boomed and now cater for a huge array of different “tastes”, there has also been an eruption of “extreme” websites that post images and videos of violence, killing and torture. You could argue that it helps people understand what is happening all over the world, but without a discernible filter in place, people can be numb to such acts when witnessed in real life and no longer shocked by something because they “saw it on the Internet”.

The emergence of Wikipedia shows us the power of group knowledge, people working together to collate information and make it available to a wider audience. But with its rise, came a reliance on information that had no fact checking and could be easily edited – schools began outlawing its use and pub quizzes were never the same after drinkers started referring to their mobile phones to research each one of the answers.

The Internet isn’t making us dumb, it’s making us lazy. If someone is inclined, they can learn to become a make-up artist based on videos posted to YouTube by a professional make-up artist or learn to play the guitar by using the website of a 12-year old musician – but information has become so available, we no longer need to commit it to memory.

Why Would You Want To Quit?

It’s true you can have too much of a good thing, but this is the same with nearly everything you interact with.

The Internet helps us stay on top of our finances, allows us to download music so we can listen to tracks on-the-go and it can assist in the tracking down of long-lost relatives. Blogs have helped housewives, the disabled and unemployed start bright new careers and social networks have allowed their users to connect with one another and become friends from opposite sides of the world.

And that’s a tiny snapshot of what is truly available thanks to the Internet.

Conclusion

“Quitting” the Internet might a little drastic, perhaps it is a case of learning to use it to your advantage. With so much information available, it can become difficult to disconnect from your work emails, log off that popular forum and go outside and do something far away from a mobile phone tower that provides your 3G signal.

The Internet has visualised every aspect on our everyday lives. For many, gone are the days of visiting travel agents, or queuing in the bank to transfer money; some gamers are even living in virtual worlds such as Second Life, a game that mimics the “real world”.

For me, it’s a balance. I still find myself checking emails and looking for stories when I am not meant to be working, I can see why people feel “burnt out” when they give themselves so much to do in a day. But without the Internet, I wouldn’t have met my wife, I wouldn’t know half the random facts I like to dazzle people with and I also wouldn’t have the chance to write the article for The Next Web I am writing today.

It’s good to sit back and take stock of what the Internet allows me to do. I know I couldn’t “quit” it, could you?