At this years past SxSW “Where are the Black Tech Blogger” panel one attendee asked a very logical and thought provoking question of all of the panelists:
“Is there a place where we all meet or a group that we all belong to?”
Seems easy enough to answer right? Tiffany Brown was able to come up with the best answer at the moment directing the attendee to Twitter and Facebook where most of us live. This small question has been nagging at me since then. I have started a Black Web 2.0 group on Collective X that I am hoping will fill this void. Many of you are already familiar with Collective X, if you aren’t we recently did a podcast with the CEO that you can check out, I think it will be a great platform to not only communicate but also to share information and media that helps us all in our day to day. One last thing before I get off my soap box, we are all really busy and may sometimes forget or not have enough time to help the next person up. It not only helps our community it helps our industry.
So if you will please take a moment out of your daily social network line-up to register for the Black Web 2.0 Group. I will be reaching out to colleges and students as well in hopes that professionals in the field can offer guidance and answer questions from those who are coming up. 
April 30th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
I am on board. The CollectiveX platform has some potential in facilitating additional networking experiences. I will poke around abit to find out how to best exploit it’s capabilities and report back.
Thanks for the invite to check it out Angela.
-Mega
May 1st, 2008 at 1:50 am
This is dope. And you didn’t use Ning to do it — definitely dope. I like that you went with CW’s product. I too will poke around and figure out some extras you might be able to do there.
But I gotta’ play devil’s advocate here. Maybe you should still create a blackweb2.0 fan page on Facebook too. It doesn’t hurt to have a lot of options for bringing people together. I understand that would be a lot to manage if you had both going on — I’m still waiting for someone to find a solution to make all of these things collaborate and cooperate with one another. I know, we wouldn’t live in a capitalist society and no one would make money if you could manage a ning network and a collectivex group a the same time.
May 1st, 2008 at 10:45 am
@mega: I look forward to hearing what you find.
@lynne: Yeah I know the only thing I could find that somewhat collaborated services was a new product from Meetup called Meetup Alliance.
http://www.meetupalliance.com/
So far they only include groups from Facebook, meetup, MySpace, google, and yahoo.
May 15th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Angela, I was thinking the very same thing. There are a lot of social networking sites to tie into, but I’d like to be more than just a subdomain off another site. We need our our own place. A friend of mine and I are playing around with some open source products which would keep us from having to develop something from scratch. I’ll let you know what we come up with.
We do get very busy and forget to help the next person up. Everyone has their own ideas and agendas, so we get tied up in making our dream happen. I hope we can all come up with some ideas at the Blogging While Brown conference. I see you all are a keynote. Can’t wait to hear what you’ve got.