The Internet is going to be a cold, dark place on January 18th. After the Reddit team announced a few days back that the site would be down on that date as a protest to the proposed SOPA legislation, a couple of other organizations have decided to throw their lot in with Reddit and stage blackouts of their own. Namely, Minecraft, Destructoid, the iCanHazCheezburger family of sites, and Anonymous, the hacker group everybody loves to hate. Dozens of smaller sites such as Red 5 Studios and Errata Security will be shutting down as well. Even Wikipedia is considering a blackout.
Now, we’re not really sure what sort of impact an Anonymous blackout would have unless they start forcing other sites to conduct impromptu, involuntary blackouts of their own, but shutting down Minecraft, Destructoid and iCanHazCheezburger would certainly point non-news-following nerds to the cause. And imagine the awareness that would be created by a Wikipedia blackout – even my grandmother uses Wikipedia!