Overtime we’ve profiled social media’s impact on the music industry, covering artist including Radio Head and Soulja Boy, but not to be out done is Grammy award winning rapper and record label CEO, Chamillionare. The north Houston underground mixtape giant, boasted over 3.5 million hits on his personal website prior to his major label deal with Universal Music.
Chamillionare talks with Mashable’s Pete Cashmore after the Digital Hollywood Conference in Los Angeles. In the interview Chamillionare discusses how social media sites contributed to his success in ringtone and album sales, as well as how the current music industry metrics don’t accurately reflect the popularity of an artist’s album. Chamillionaire also discusses how Weird Al’s YouTube parody of “Ridin” (White and Nerdy), help propel the 2006 single to #1 and his subsequent award of Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group.
I had the pleasure of being able to talk with Brett Wright of UptownLife.net. UptownLife recently relaunched, a little over a couple a weeks ago, and is more or less the online version of Uptown magazine. See below for the full email exchange: Read the rest of this entry »
During an interesting conversation today the topic of “Young, Black, and…” sites came up and how many of these sites do we really need? How minute can it be before it becomes irrelevant, or does relevancy of a site with Black in its name ever die simply because of the niche nature of the internet today? A simpler and more direct question may be “How many of these sites will be developed before it gets old?” Maybe it never gets old since web users are in general younger in age, or a completely different and possibly more accurate take on it: Read the rest of this entry »
I am officially addicted to Slideshare. There is a very insightful deck from this years Web 2.0 Expo by Erika from Mule Design. I originally came across it on Anil Dash’s site. I often hear that in many organizations, especially content driven ones, there is a battle between design and editorial/content. Designers think it is all about visual presentation while content owners think it is all about the written word. Both are actually right, it is a marriage of the 2. The “Copy as Interface” deck talks a little about this but also goes over “Web 2.0 writing” as well as some do’s and don’ts. You can view the slide below or on Slideshare: Read the rest of this entry »
I just received my Dropbox beta invite, and already contemplating getting rid of some of my external storage devices. Dropbox is an Amazon S3 based online storage solution that allows users to seamlessly store your files in “the cloud” making them accessible from any location. Dropbox comes with a Python-based desktop client for both Mac and Windows, that creates and links shared folders from your computer to your online Dropbox. The application creates a folder on your computer called “My Dropbox”. Once files from you desktop are placed in the “My Dropbox” folder, they are instantly synced to your online Dropbox or any desktop computer with the client installed. Read the rest of this entry »
Today Carol’s Daughter conducted a bloggers roundtable on Ustream in lieu of a press conference, bloggers and influencer’s were invited to participate, Black Web 2.0 was fortunate to be one of the participants. Read the rest of this entry »
Though I have been dedicated to Netvibes for a while now I may be making a switch back to iGoogle. Not long ago we covered Netvibes’ launch of Ginger, it’s not shabby by any means and also has lots of cool features, but if you are looking for a start page that can match your personal style or clothes you may want to consider switching to iGoogle. Why you ask? iGoogle recently launched (not sure exactly when but I just noticed it yesterday) Artist Themes. Artist Themes are basically skins by fashion designers and artists. Some notable designers and some of my personal favorites are: Read the rest of this entry »
According to the latest U.S. numbers from Hitwise, the top niche dating sites are steadily gaining market share while their big mainstream counterparts stagnate. This report compared the overall market share of the top 5 dating sites; Singlesnet, Plentyoffish, TRUE, Yahoo Personals, and Match to the market share of some of the top niche categories (sexual preferences, race, and religions). The Black niche category included; BlackPeopleMeet, BlackSingles, BlackChristianPeopleMeet.
While mainstream dating websites declined in monthly market share (-7%), Black niche dating sites grew 14% from 5.26% to 6.01% of US market share.
This decline in market share for mainstream dating sites could be due to a number of reasons not examined by this article including; lack of space for mainstream sites to grow and an increase competition from mainstream social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook being just some them, but one thing’s for certain, the “one size fit all” sites are not meeting the needs of the entire population, creating opportunities for success in the niche market.
It was going to happen sooner or later. Google took a step forward in intertwining the almighty “G” into one of its acquisitions today. Google will integrate its Adsense product into Feedburner RSS feeds. Mashable first reported this development from a coy hint from Allen Stern via Feedburner’s blog:
FeedBurner will start to look and feel more like a set of Google services, and we will be completing much tighter integration into other Google services such as Google AdSense. (If you are a feed advertiser, don’t worry: we have some happy surprises coming for you as well, and if you are an advertiser who is not yet a feed advertiser, you too shall be blessed with good fortune.
Hmmmm…Hopefully this will be opt in for publishers. Google contextual ads for Black content is not a good look.
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