Black Web 2.0

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…)

Who said the housing slump couldn’t be overcome with a new coat of paint? Well the same theory applies to your favorite professional networking site. The jury may still be out on this, but the LinkedIn home page is in Beta test with a completely new coat of paint, with one or two new upgrades as well.

The redesigned page boasts a much better information architecture, particularly as it relates to navigating to core functionality like the inbox, profile, contacts, and groups. Additionally it provides a nice and concise snapshot view of the user’s profile with profile photo, # of contacts, and a summary of the number of views in a given week. (more…)

We got an exclusive set of beta user accounts for you guys to checkout from Musana, a new music portal set to launch later this year. The portal is built on ASP.NET, and uses the ASP AJAX toolkit for the Javascript UI features. Not sure if they are using Silverlight, but it would be the way to go for bowser based cross platform media streaming compatibility. (more…)

Create the new Black Weblog Awards theme and you could win an iPod!

The Black Weblog Awards is looking for a new theme for 2008, and your entry could be the winning one! The grand prize winner of our theme contest will have their creation used as the theme for the 2008 Black Weblog Awards and will win an 80GB iPod Classic from Apple, Inc.!

Deadline: February 29, 2008 at 11:59pm EST

The winner will be announced on March 3!

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CONTEST RULES:

All eligible entries should include the following:
- a logo (.psd, .ai or .eps format)
- a slogan (ten words or less; nothing derogatory or profane)
- a brief explanation of the theme (100 words or less)

Submit this in a compressed file (.zip, .rar or .sit) and title it with your name and “2008 BWA Theme” and send it to contest@blackweblogawards.com. Please include your slogan and explanation as documents in the compressed file, not in the body of the e-mail (entries that don’t follow this format will be ineligible).

Please submit only one entry per household.

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For additional provisions and rules, please check the Black Weblog Awards Blog: http://www.blackweblogawards.com/blog

If you haven’t heard of theRoot.com, it is a recently launched joint venture between the Washingtonpost.com and Newsweek Interactive lead by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as the EIC. Gates is also the co-founder of AfricanDNA.com which also powers theRoot.com genealogy or Roots section of the site.

While in general sites that adhere to a minimalist design are appealing, this site seems almost unfinished. This is most likely intentional, as it ends up making the focus on the content. (more…)

Yesterday GlobalGrind announced their redesign on their blog. With the design being more simplified and usable it seems as if GlobalGrind has modified their business model as well. When we covered the sites’ public Beta launch in September the concept was more like a startpage and was based on the Pageflakes API, currently the site is more “flat” and has moved to a Digg-like concept. Users can “Grind” content or “Trash it,” GlobalGrinds equivalent of being “Dugg” or “Buried.” On the current site users are also prompted to submit content, discover new content, and look at content from a “global view.” Content is broken down into categories and within those categories a user has the option to view different content types such as Photos, Video, and Stories. (more…)

If you haven’t seen Microsoft’s Surface take a few minuets to watch this video from this year’s CES:

Can you imagine this type of experience translated onto a website?

Today AOL relaunched BlackVoices. While the clean look of the site is appeasing the biggest and most notable change is the welcoming community that the site now offers readers. For those of you who are like me and like to comment on articles but not so much in forums you will be happy to see that this is now an option. Not to be overlooked the site also has a new logo, which I am happy to see the logotype is free from the block like typeface that is typically used on sites that cater to a demographic of African decent, BV had been moving away from this look for a while now. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to our podcast with BlackVoices Director Tariq Muhammad put that on your to-do list, he gives some great insight on where BlackVoices is headed. In the meantime here is a little of what Tariq has to say about BV:

“Although we are already the leader in the space, there are always opportunities to better serve the evolving needs of our audience,” said Tariq Muhammad, Director of Black Voices. “This relaunch is designed to enhance the overall consumer experience by adding new elements, improving existing features and truly offering a community platform so that our engaged users can connect with each other on issues that matter to them.”

BV will also move forward with having an increased focus on news; breaking it and also giving commentary from a black perspective. Overall nice job, not a huge difference content-wise just yet but aesthetically pleasing, uncluttered, and clean. On thing I would like to see in the future; and frankly if there is this new focus on community should be there in the future; is more community integration. BV has unbelievably active users in their forums, bringing some of this activity directly from the forums into the articles and allowing users to interact with user profiles from within articles could be what ties this whole site together and what makes it truly a community. Right now it is still disconnected of course it is just day 1 though and I am sure there will be other updates to come on BV. Another major web property for Blacks moving in the right direction! Who’s got next?

Young and middle-aged white men are designing the modern Web.

It’s a rather obvious claim which can be supported by the results from the 2007 Web Design Survey results from A List Apart (ALA). According to ALA, “the results represent the first data ever collected on the business of web design and development as practiced in the U.S. and worldwide. Actually, Sitepoint beat them to it with their web development survey back in 2006, with results given from a more technical development standpoint. ALA actually breaks down their report data by race, age and gender, and lends itself to a couple of findings:

• Out of the 32,831 respondents, 1.2% (about 394 people) are Black…or rather, 1.2% identified themselves as Black. 1% of respondents (328 people) did not answer the question of race, and 3.2% of respondents (1,050 people) replied as “Other”.
• 302 of the 32,831 respondents are identified as Black males; 96 of the 32,831 respondents are identified as Black females. (Two responded as being Black without identifying their gender.)

What’s interesting mostly about the ALA study are the questions on perceived bias (by geography, age, gender and ethnicity), salary (by organization size, gender and age), job satisfaction (by organization type, gender, ethnicity, salary, age and job title). However, the results overall downplay both gender and ethnicity. No huge shock there considering the majority of the respondents were white males, but I hope next year’s survey delves into these areas because they are truly important. The survey does point out some other non-shocking findings (emphasis in bold is mine):

• All non-White respondents are less satisfied and more unsatisfied in their jobs than white respondents, with black respondents having the greatest disparity (30.8% are less satisfied; 51.2% are more unsatisfied).
• More non-white than white respondents perceive an ethnic bias that has slowed their careers. Approximately 8% of Asian and Hispanic respondents and 20% of Black respondents perceive this bias, compared to 1.7% of White respondents.
  
• Perceptions are similar in the US, Europe and the rest of the world. But in Europe and the rest of the world, greater percentages of all ethnic categories(including White respondents) perceive an ethnic bias that has slowed their careers than do their US counterparts.
• Similar patterns emerge when we examine the relationship between income and the perception of ethnic bias. Of respondents who work full time, Asian, Hispanic and White respondents who perceive ethnic bias appear to earn less than those who don’t. However, Black respondents who work full time and perceive ethnic bias earn more than those who don’t perceive ethnic bias.
  

Mo’ money, less problems? You decide.

The results of the survey are currently making their way around the Web, already showing up on Slashdot, Metafilter and Digg, as well as comments on ALA. They range from “why did you make this a PDF” to questions about fonts used in the document. There is a lot of talk about the huge gender gap in the web design field, but very little about race.

One thing I noticed from the raw data was a huge opportunity ALA missed, perhaps in the wake of the whole “where are the black tech bloggers” kerfuffle started by Loren Feldman — prevalence of blogging was not factored in by race, even though the raw data available from ALA shows 75% of Black respondents do have a website or blog. Blogging and web design fit together like hand in glove, particularly in this new Web 2.0 atmosphere; I don’t see why they would even include the question without fully exploring all the data related to it for the results.

Now you may think “what does all of this this really have to do with Web 2.0?” Well if there’s one thing which signifies the whole Web 2.0 movement, it’s the design. There are several trends in design which are just as recognized as the ideas, development procedures and programming which they represent. Gradients, reflective surfaces, and a move towards more minimalist, grid-based designs are just a couple of the many factors of Web 2.0 design.

Personally, as a Black web designer/developer/webmaster/writer/jack-of-all-trades…I’m not surprised by the results. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been to a conference or a training session or a job where I’m the only Black male designer. And having worked in design from everywhere to my personal freelance business to the United States government, the bias is palpable. Co-workers, regardless of your skill, still downplay your abilities. Management second-guesses your input and ideas. And don’t even get me started on the freelance tip. These survey results spell out in hard data what Blacks in the web field are already cognizant about — we’re absent.

I guess the question to take away from this is, where are the Black web professionals? And furthermore, how (or will) they contribute their skills to this new Web 2.0 movement?

BET.com recently redesigned their site, if you swing over there you will be please to see that the content is organized so much better then before and thus easier to read. Editorial and news on the site is presented in blogs rather then articles on static web pages powered by overly complex Content Management Systems that don’t allow for user comments and feedback. Don’t get me wrong, you can still find these standard articles (you know, the ones you have to click discuss to actually comment about) but the number of News and Articles in blogs far outweighs this. Throughout the site you will notice a small BET on Blast video player in the top left that actually plays content related to the page a user is on. So for instance, I was in Lifestyle and web only clips from BET Black Carpet played on that page. On the News page, BET News updates play. Smart. My only beef with it is that the videos automatically play, which is fine if I am in the comfort of my own home and only have to be mildly startled because my volume is up to loud. But if a user is at work or some where else and happens to not have on earphones this could pose a problem for the user causing one not to visit the site during work hours and we all know that is when and where everyone visits most websites. (more…)