CNN Wednesday suspended commentator Roland Martin over the tweets that the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation has denounced as anti-gay.

Roland MartinA CNN spokeswoman confirmed Wednesday afternoon that the network issued this statement:

“Roland Martin’s tweets were regrettable and offensive. Language that demeans is inconsistent with the values and culture of our organization, and is not tolerated. We have been giving careful consideration to this matter, and Roland will not be appearing on our air for the time being.”

Spokesmen for TVOne and the syndicated “Tom Joyner Morning Show,” where Martin also appears, did not respond to requests for comment.

At 10 p.m. Eastern time, Martin tweeted that he would reverse course and meet with GLAAD, which tweeted back, “We look forward to a productive dialogue and to working together as well.”

“Fam, late last night I received word of GLAAD’s invitation to meet with me, and as I have informed CNN…  I look forward to meeting with GLAAD in the near future and having a productive dialogue,” Martin said in words spread across two tweets.

Read the rest of this article at Journal-isms

(Photo: NYTimes)

African Americans in Mississippi often have fewer options for high-speed Internet and spend a higher proportion of their incomes on the Internet than whites in the state,according to a new reportunderscoring how the digital divide splits along racial lines.

Mississippi ranks among the worst states in the nation in terms of broadband availability, and residents must choose among older, slower and less-reliable Internet technologies than people in other states, according to a report released Tuesday by the Center for Social Inclusion and the Mississippi NAACP.

“We must implement aggressive and fair broadband infrastructure policies in order to bring Mississippi into the 21st century economy,” Derrick Johnson, state president of the Mississippi State Conference NAACP, said in a statement.

The report found that African Americans in Mississippi are at a particular disadvantage, partly because of where they live. Of the 10 counties in the state with the most options for Internet service providers, only one county has a majority of African Americans, according to the report. This is significant because areas of Mississippi with the greatest number of Internet service providers — in this case, areas with a majority of whites — tend to do better economically, the report found. There were an average of 378 businesses in areas of the state with four to seven Internet providers per zip code, compared with an average of 55 businesses in areas where there were three providers or less.

Read the rest of this article at Huff. Post Black Voices

U.S. Prosecutors shutting down MegaUpload has left some people disappointed. Being one of the most popular file-sharing sites out there, many don’t even know of other sites that are available that do the same thing MegaUpload once did.

One alternative is FileBlaze, a a secured cloud-based file storage and streaming platform by minority founder Chuck Baker.

Fileblaze offers various services from file sharing, storage, and streaming. Fileblaze is a platform catered to artists and media professionals who deal with sensitive content; including music, video, images and documents, but is open to anyone.

With Fileblaze you can queue up multiple files in one upload. It figures out file types for you and sorts them accordingly and allows you to play music while handling other tasks.

They recently entered a partnership with RocNation in 2011 in which Fileblaze now releases exclusive tracks from the record label and allows streaming.

For some other options in addition to Fileblaze go to LifeHacker where they compiled a list of 5 file-sharing sites to check out.

What file-sharing sites do you use?

Google announced today, President Obama will participate in a Hangout on Google+ to discuss Tuesday’s State of the Union Address.

The 45-minute live Hangout will take place Monday afternoon, Jan. 30 and will give people the opportunity to ask the president questions about the address.

According to the Associated Press, Google+ will solicit questions over the video sharing site YouTube, and users will then vote on their favorites. The president will answer some video questions, and will also chat directly with a group of the questioners.

Social media is playing a major role in politics right now, especially being election year. President Obama and his team plan to utilize social engagement to its highest potential to better connect with the people as he has done in the past with town hall meetings via YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

The Hangout will appear on the White House Google+ page, and will be live streamed on whitehouse.gov.

One of the largest file-sharing sites, Megaupload.com was shut down today. Its founder, Kim Dotcom and several company executives were charged with violating piracy laws.

Rapper/producer, Swizz Beatz was listed as CEO of the company but there are no reports of him being indicted.

According to the Associated Press, an indictment does accuse Megaupload.com of costing copyright holders more than $500 million in lost revenue from pirated films and other content.

Megaupload was one of the most popular file-sharing sites because of its major celebrity endorsements such as Kanye West, Alicia Keys, and others that have supported the site. Ironic because issues with copy infringement and piracy usually affect music artists.

Wikipedia, Reddit, and Boing Boing and many other sites are staging global blackouts tomorrow to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. Specifically, Wikipedia, which has been a very vocal opponent of the restrictive set of bills, polled 1800 users and with their support has chosen to take down its English pages all day on January 18. What are they protesting exactly? SOPA and PIPA have very restrictive language with a broad reach that will basically change the internet and freedom of expression as we know it:

From the Washington Post:

At a basic level, SOPA — and its Senate analogue, the Protect IP Act — would enable copyright holders and the Justice Department to get court orders against sites that “engage in, enable, or facilitate” copyright infringement. That could include, say, sites that host illegal mp3s or sites that link to such sites (the revised House bill focuses primarily on foreign sites like, oh, Pirate Bay). Courts could bar advertisers and payment companies such as PayPal from doing business with the offending sites in question, order search engines to stop listing the accused infringers, or even require Internet service providers to block access entirely. The bills contain other provisions, too, like making it a felony to stream unauthorized content online.

Read the rest of this article at Clutch Magazine

The Root said goodbye to its Managing Editor, Joel Dreyfuss  in Nov. 2011. Sheryl Huggins Salomon then immediately took his place leaving the position for Deputy Editor unfilled. Today The Root announced they have promoted former Associate Editor, Lauren Williams to the position.

Lauren has been Associate Editor of The Root since the Fall of 2010. Her editorial background includes: editor at AOL Black Voices, Stereohyped, and MenuPages, as well as a reporter at The Daily Press in Virginia.  She has a B.A. from the University of Virginia and an M.A. in Magazine, Newspaper and Online Journalism from the Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University.

The Roots says Williams brings a wealth of experience in journalism, online media, and editorial management to her new role as Deputy Editor.  Williams will be based in the DC office.

Another exciting year in technology has passed. In 2011 we saw new mobile startups gain million of users, a new social network launch to take on Facebook, patent wars and sadly deaths. But what were the top tech stories from 2011? Here’s the list:

1. Sony PlayStation Hack
2. Amazon Kindle Fire
3. Microsoft acquires Skype
4. AT&T Fails to Acquire T-Mobile
5. Apple Goes to War Over Patents
6. Netflix ditched plans for Qwikster
7. No iPhone 5
8. The Windows 8 preview launch
9. What Happened, RIM?
10. HP Wavers on WebOS, Consumer PCs
11. Nokia’s Windows Phone gamble
12. Kindle Fire’s Launch
13. Cyber Attacks
14. Google+ launch
15. Death of Steve Jobs

Sources:
The Top 10 (plus 1) Tech News Stories of 2011 via neowin.net
The Top 10 Tech Stories of 2011 via PCMag

What was the biggest story in Tech from 2011 to you?

Today WordPress announced version 3.3 of their publishing software platfrom code named “Sonny” in honor of jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt. WordPress 3.3 comes with a an aray of new features and a slick new dashboard redesign. Four of WordPress 3.3 new features I’m excited about are:

1. Easier file uploading with file type detection and drag and drop uploads.
2. A Tumblr Importer for Tumblr users who want to make the jump.
3. Widget Improvements so if you change your theme you don’t have to redo your widgets.
4. Responsive design for better publishing with an iPad and other tablets.

Here’s a video from WordPress highlighting some of the above features and more.

Take a look at the redesigned dashboard.

You can download WordPress 3.3 here or update inside your WordPress dashboard.

If you upgraded to the latest version of WordPress 3.3 let us know what you think in the comments.