Just in case you managed to miss it, it’s January 18 today, and countless of websites show their support for the fight against the controversial SOPA legislation in the U.S.

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) is a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) is a bill in the U.S. Senate. Figuring out exactly what the effect would be if the bills would pass is not easy. However, a widespread concern seems to be that it would “threaten prosperity, online security, and freedom of expression.”

In response to SOPA and PIPA, Reddit kicked off a campaign to blackout its site today in protest. That steamrolled and hundreds, if not thousands, of sites around the world are now taking part in this movement.

How each site displays its opposition is different and varies greatly. We have looked at a selection; many brought to us by our Twitter followers.

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So what happened with the Internet in 2011? How many email accounts were there in the world in 2011? How many websites? How much did the most expensive domain name cost? How many photos were hosted on Facebook? How many videos were viewed to YouTube?

We’ve got answers to these questions and many more. A veritable smorgasbord of numbers, statistics and data lies in front of you. Using a variety of sources we’ve compiled what we think are some of the more interesting numbers that describe the Internet in 2011.

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No, we didn’t go to CES this year, but we’ve followed the action from Las Vegas from afar with great interest.

Today is the last day of CES, so we wanted to bring you a selection of what we thought were the most exciting new gadgets and technology coming out of Las Vegas this January.

So here’s our pick for the ten most exciting gadgets at CES 2012, in no particular order.

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In December, we looked at how the Internet has spread across the world from 1991 to 2010. We presented this in the form of an animation, highlighting each country in different colors depending in what percentages of the population were online.

Now we bring you a follow-up. This time we use data from the World Bank for mobile subscriptions per 100 people and map it out over the years.

As it turns out, there’s quite a difference between the two.

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Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.

In this show we are joined by Erik Pettersson from Improove.se and we talk to him about the mashup between Google Analytics and Pingdom he has created. Erik also joins us for a chat about some of the things that have been introduced at this year’s CES in Las Vegas.

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Last week we published an article declaring that NGINX had become the second most used web server software in the world, thereby overtaking Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS).

In that article, based on figures from Netcraft’s Web Server Survey, we looked at the data for “active sites.” NGINX had in that category pulled ahead of IIS for the first time, even though it was by a slim margin. NGINX accounted for 22,221,514 servers and IIS accounted for 22,142,114.

As we noted then, if you instead look at Netcraft’s “Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains,” NGINX is still behind IIS. The margin is substantial but closing. We stated that NGINX might take the number two spot even in that category this year.

Now, let’s find out if that can happen and if so, when.

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Apple is often referred to as a design leader. Since Steve Jobs came back and took over the company in 1997, the focus and inventiveness shown by Apple’s industrial design team has been remarkable.

Apple’s design prowess has greatly influenced the evolution of the common laptop over the past 10+ years. The company has gone from being a marginal player in that market to become one of the biggest, most popular laptop manufacturers in the world.

That success has of course bred imitation from other laptop makers, some subtle, some not so subtle. Would today’s laptops be as slick and beautiful without the influence from Apple? Most likely not.

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The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) will officially kick off in Las Vegas tomorrow. One thing we know for sure is that tablets will be one of the hottest types of gadgets in this year’s show. That’s evident already from the pre-show coverage: there’s everything from Toshiba’s “thinnest and lightest” tablet to a “waterproof” LTE Android tablet.

And since CES is upon us, we know we’re just a few days into the new year, so chances are that not many actual figures for sales of tablets in 2011 will have hit us yet.

However, we have managed to find a few and wanted to see how they stack up against the forecasts that have been made.

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Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff. In this show we covered a number of topics, including The mobile web in numbers, Symbian is still top mobile OS, Apple’s App Store generates 6x the revenue of Android Market in the US, Ice Cream Sandwich & General Android post-ICS? End of Fragmentation?, Unmodified Holo theme now a requirement for devices with Android Market access, RIM PlayBook Now Available for $199 in the US, and more.

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In the latest Netcraft Web Server for January 2012, the lightweight open source web server software NGINX amassed more active sites than Microsoft Internet Information Server for the first time.

That makes NGINX the second more used web server software in the world right now, only trumped by Apache.

Let’s look at the numbers.

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