Yesterday, a number of sites went down in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA.
Many of the sites were big- like Wikipedia, or Reddit- but several smaller sites went down in solidarity, either going dark, displaying a graphic designed especially for the protest, or directing users to another site explaining the potential effects of SOPA on their business and the internet in general. One of the sites that participated was the wildly virally successful web-comic The Oatmeal, and creator Matthew Inman pulled down his backlog of hysterical comics- replacing them with a rather lengthy animated GIF explaining SOPA to readers .
While The Oatmeal is popular among heavy web-users and has a big following on sites like Reddit, Inman didn’t expect the influx of attention from mainstream media sources surrounding his anti-SOPA gif. In a letter posted today on his website, he posted a new graphic about his life’s goals and explains how stunned he was to see the image on CNN and similar outlets during coverage of the SOPA protests:
Inman writes:
…the animated GIF received coverage from CNN, Sports Illustrated, Mashable, Business Insider, MSNBC, and a bumload of other mainstream news sources. It was also trending worldwide on Twitter and according to Tweetmeme it was one of the most tweeted links on earth yesterday… Why am I telling you this? Because I’m fairly certain getting koala lovemaking on CNN is the highlight of my career and I wanted to share the moment with you.
You can read The Oatmeal’s full letter to the web about the SOPA protest aftermath here .
