Around 1:30pm EST, I received an email from the address “nytimes@email.newyorktimes.com” regarding a recent cancellation of home delivery. I thought it was strange, since I’m not a home delivery subscriber, and chalked it up to a simple mistake. But according to the NYTimes’ Twitter account, the email is in fact a fake. “If you received an email today about canceling your NYT subscription, ignore it. It’s not from us,” tweeted @nytimes shortly after the email was sent.  The Times’ SVP of Corporate Communications, Robert Christie, added, “We are investigating emails, please contact Eileen Murphy for full comment: eileen.murphy@nytimes.com.”

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In conjunction with EyeTrackShop, Mashable released a study today documenting what elements of a Facebook brand page users tend to look at most. Information like this is key to building a successful brand page that encourages community engagement.

The team at Mashable found that the Wall–particularly the first few posts on the Wall–garners the most eye attention from fans, indicating that valuable fan interactions as well as interesting post content are key to keeping a fan’s attention. According to Mashable, “The 30 participants who viewed top Facebook brand pages almost always looked at pages’ walls first — usually for at least four times longer than any other element on the page.”

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Flipboard, the social magazine iPad app that organizes sectionalized content (like “News,” “Technology” and “Food”) and social network updates into a sleek, unified interface, launched its highly anticipated iPhone app today. With the roll out, Flipboard announced a new feature called Cover Stories, which, according to CNET, “learns from a reader’s interactions with the content and helps them quickly catch up with some of the most interesting news, updates, and photos being shared at that moment.”

The new app easily translates the intuitive gestures that make the iPad version so enjoyable into those friendlier for the small screen: instead of horizontally swiping to turn pages, the iPhone version allows vertical swiping, which makes it much easier to navigate on the smaller device.

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Yesterday Facebook released a list of the 40 most shared articles so far in 2011. The full list runs the gamut from investigative and international stories to viral videos, but with one unifying thread: all articles came from major news sources. As Mashable notes, “All 40 of the stories come from just six online outlets: Yahoo has 13 stories, CNN has 11, the New York Times has 7, The Huffington Post has 7, The Wall Street Journal has one and the Washington Post has one.”

Many of the articles can also be grouped around some salient themes: parenting (“Parents, don’t dress your girls like tramps” is #4), the Japanese quake (“Satellite Photos of Japan, Before and After the Quake and Tsunami” is #1) and viral videos (the “Father Daughter Dance Medley” video is #5).

So what does this tell us about article sharing on Facebook? It’s no surprise that huge international issues like Japan’s earthquake top the 2011 list, but the study does provide an interesting snapshot of the Internet hive mind in 2011. “The stories range from cute to thought provoking,” writes Facebook, “and represent the type of news people have been sharing and discovering with friends in 2011.”

You can read the full list here.

Unless you’re wholly entrenched in the daily goings on of Internet and copyright law, SOPA might be one of those things you hadn’t even heard of until this morning, when sites like BoingBoing and Tumblr and GigaOm launched posts explaining and condemning it. SOPA is the Stop Online Piracy Act, a bill introduced into the House that, according to a New York Times OpEd, “would empower the attorney general to create a blacklist of sites to be blocked by Internet service providers, search engines, payment providers and advertising networks, all without a court hearing or a trial. [SOPA] goes further, allowing private companies to sue service providers for even briefly and unknowingly hosting content that infringes on copyright.”

Sounds pretty scary, right? The SOPA hearings started in the House today, and that’s why today has been declared American Censorship Day. Numerous companies and websites are attempting to raise awareness about SOPA in an attempt to “save the Internet” and hopefully block the passage of the law. But so far, according to Techdirt, the odds are stacked 5 to 1 in favor of passing the bill.

SOPA has many implications for casual Internet users, but for journalists the repercussions of SOPA passing could be immense. Here are a few ways in which the passage of SOPA could impact journalists and their organizations.

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