Black Web 2.0

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: (more…)

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: (more…)

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: (more…)

AOL has done an exceptional job positioning themselves in most major vertical markets, but more than just their presence AOL has completely dominated most of these spaces. Black voices is no exception, the industry leader in the Black Community News, AOL is starting to see the benefit from the success of BV and other niche focused websites. AOL property’s have hit an all time high in high in unique visitors and traffic in March, the company says. Page views to AOL’s network of sites are up 35% over the last year and unique visitors up 11% to 56 million (AOL as a whole draws 209 million monthly unique visitors, says Comscore). AOL attributes its recent success to its year long rebranding and redesign efforts, noting that every key vertical site has been redesigned. (Check out our coverage of the Black Voices Redesign).

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Today marks the 40th anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. King was assassinated, as he stood outside of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968. He was 39. Media sites and blogs all over, honored Dr. King’s life and legacy through touching articles, thought provoking poll questions, and video and image galleries.

We have compiled the best web coverage of the 40 year anniversary of Dr. King’s death.
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Shirley B. of Dallas, Texas is the winner of the 2008 Black Weblog Awards theme contest. Her theme’s inspiration was pulled from 1940s Russian propaganda. Here is a peak at what to expect: (more…)

What do you get if you mix the blog searching capabilities of Technorati, the news capabilities of Google News, the product aggregation of Froogle, with a Digg-like article submission and ranking system? The answer is… Wikio, the European based personalizable news portal and media search engine. Wikio delivers the top news and videos from over 55,000 media sites and over 30,000 blogs. With Wikio you can customize, save and share your own personal news pages by adding any keywords, subjects, or RSS feeds that interest you. Your custom portal pages will then be updated as soon as the keywords you specify are found in any articles, site, or blog indexed by Wikio. Wikio’s approach on personalization allows users to be as specific or as broad as they would like, and the fact that they only index a small amount sites (that I assume go through some sort of verification process) means that the information you get will more than likely come from a viable source. (more…)

Just what you need to start your weekend off — a YouTube video of a rapper — Poetic Prophet — who fancies himself the SEO Rapper. For what he lacks in delivery, he makes up for as a writer. There are some clever phrases in here on the relationship between design and SEO. Too bad he’s not a little more like the Jay-Z of Web rapping, but at this point we’ll take what we can get. Kudos.

To see more of his vids, visit m0serious’s YouTube channel and catch previous raps like, “Paid Search 101 rap” and “Link Building 101 Rap.” We can’t make this stuff up.

MIX08 got off with a BIG BANG today with what looked like a full house (roughly 900-1200 people in the keynote). Ray Ozzie kicked off the event and shared his vision for how Web developers and designers can deliver seamless rich media experiences across web applications, rich desktop clients and mobile devices with the HUB strategy.

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The anticipation is building here in our offices for the MIX08 show in Las Vegas. I am looking forward to seeing the lastest and greatest MASH UPS with Live.com Silverlight, and the new features in Visual Studio, SQL 2008, and Windows Server 2008. (more…)