The Black Internet Space: Different but not Really

Diddy TV and the Diddy TV Video blog,  Have you seen it?  HILARIOUS (if not it is embedded above)!!  This last, Diddy Blog #10: Bitchassness Alert Level Orange, was definitely LOL worthy!  Diddy is working YouTube, just like everyone else, creating viral awareness of his brands biggest asset…himself.   PLUS, it looks like he is having fun and I always appreciate the LOL’s.  One of the other cool things I found on YouTube:  make up and hair care tutorials for black women from every day people who just want to show off their skills to Iman Cosmetics.  And let me tell you, the day I found Dancehall Lessons on YouTube was one of the happiest days of my internet life.  The whole time I was in NYC I searched for Dancehall Lessons and found nothing, but leave it to YouTube to fill in where that little city couldn’t.

I have my Google news set up to find all stories with “African-American” and “black people” along with some other variations (“black women” etc.).  As a result I have found some pretty interesting small news sources I wouldn’t have found otherwise (we won’t get into the design of most of these small sites, that would be a whole other post).   We all know there have been tons of attempts to start black news channels.  I’m still waiting for it.   News Aggregators seem to be the future of online News, and Google is, again, the “mack daddy” of the group, getting sued left and right as a result, but they’re the juggernaut so it doesn’t matter.  Hold on, I am seeing a theme:

You Tube =  Google
Google News = Google

Keyword Search.  I know the belief is that Keyword Search is falling of the way side and vertical search is the new black.   Nonetheless, the black experience is unique.  There are, in fact, keywords that we use within our community that mark our stuff as ours.  Plus, we’ve all learned that if we insert “black” or “African-American” we can generally find stuff that is relevant to us.   The point is, it isn’t hard to find the stuff we are looking for, even with the mainstream, majority target offerings that exist right now if you know how to look.

This is not to say Google is the end all be all, they are just the biggest right now.  Black people use Google, MySpace, and Facebook too.  You name any big site and I bet you somewhere hidden beneath the surface is a lively and active black community.  We always create our own community within the [enter big dot com name here] community of users.  Does this remind you of anything?  Ok, I’ll call it out in case you are missing it.  The internet looks just like the real world a bit, doesn’t it?

That said, the one place where we are really able to be ourselves, even in the online environment, is in the blogsphere (compare comments on say, a Perez Hilton blog post vs. crunktastikal).  The blog sphere is “our community” online.  That is why I am looking forward to the Black Weblog Awards.  Every year there are a few cool sites that pop up that I managed to somehow miss.

Now, I do think vertical sites have a place in the black community.   Vertical sites that actually have a well thought out purpose and goal with real technology behind them?  Those are great too, there just aren’t a lot… yet.