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…)

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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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…)

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…)

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…)

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?

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…)

Visually…Very nice, I was totally impressed and eager to explore the site more when I just happen to login one day a few months ago. Overall content was presented effectively (I didn’t expect anything less, they have insightful editorials, reviews, and features); a commerce element (powerd by Amazon) was intergrated into the site seamlessly; media in the form of video, audio, and podcasts received a makeover and are now in a slick branded player that gives the user the option of opening it in a new window.

I do wish there were more social networking features intergrated directly into the site. While AllHipHop.com has a presence on MySpace and MySpaceTV the only other social type of website I could find them on was Yahoo! Answers. I also really feel like their content; especially in their ‘media zone;’ could benefit from adding a ’share’ feature. Most content on the site includes a rating system for users and allows comments.

AllHipHop.com’s community forums are extremely active so there is definitely a community aspect to their new 2.0 redesign. I think the community and website could benefit from using tools such as Twitter for their users and also staff. Not like they don’t have an engaged community already; I just think that doing so could add that much more to AllHipHop, creating a HipHop portal of sorts, where users could be engaged literally 24×7.

With so many options for using Social Networks, which do you think would be most successful in a scenario such as this?

***Note: I wanted to add that the do have a forum called IllTek that is technology based for Techie’s who also love Hip Hop (we do exist).***

I must say I love EbonyJet.com the design is so clean and the approach to publish the publications content in a blog format versus the typical online magazine format is refreshing, and lets not forget this site is not even officially launched yet! Ebony and Jet has definitely brought their ‘A’ game. This does lead me to wonder when other websites who cater to similar, older demographics will follow? Lynne d Johnson recently gave an overview on Old Black Media Getting a Whiff of Web 2.0 and makes some great observations on not only EbonyJet.com but the many other websites that have embraced Web 2.0 lately..

I recently came across BET’s new broadband video player called BET On Blast and was very impressed with the presentation of the video content. The UI as a whole is slick. Even the ads featured here flow seamlessly into the design and look as if they belong there, this can be hard for some designers to execute and some completely overlook it as part of the design. Paying attention to this sort of thing only strengthens a brand.

The navigation is smooth and usable with 2nd level links being presented as dropdowns in the nav and also the the right on the player. There is a clear but not overwhelming use of iconography for the “info” button. Clicking this button triggers a panel to flip and displays additional information as well as an option to email that particular video. The Playlist itself also has smooth transitions similar to the main nav, I like it but I don’t think it should slide to cove content and most importantly navigation. The only other improvement that I think could be made is to make the drag and drop functionality of each video more intuitive, the text that displays on rollover of a panel is to the point and straight forward, no doubt about that, but even so I naturally felt the need to want to drag and drop directly into the video player.

Overall I think the site is beautiful (not to mention we have a similar color pallet ) and is a great use of Flash especially when most would have opted to use AJAX.