“Essence.com gets Ning-y with it” and other links…
I have been following Black Web 2.0 for a few weeks now (hat tip to Tiffany B. Brown). Their celebration of the newly designed Essence.com in “Essence.com gets Ning-y with it” is well deserved. I can assume that this is an inside job since the article does not mention some hopefully-Black-owned Web design firm. An inside job means that Essence is actually paying people fulltime to build a web site which is incredibly impressive for a Black-owned business (as a backgrounder, check out my entry from 2007, “The One United Bank Experiment”).
Remember that Black-owned businesses are run largely by conservative business people (remember sitting in that science or literature class you adored with econ majors?). And my flagrant stereotype about North American Black conservative “business leaders” is that they are about five to fifty years behind in the knowledge and use of the technology white people like. Remember we as a people do everything better—and this includes being arrogantly blind and exceedingly mediocre gatekeepers, cock blocking the real technical brothers (like me) that end up working somewhere else. (Do I sound bitter, sweetie?) So it is even more impressive that Essence.com only produces two XHTML validation warnings while a typical page here at kintespace.com produces about 30 (thanks, Google). Essence.com is clean. As a ‘classic’ Web site it is a first class achievement.
However, Black Web 2.0 does point out that, “…what is clearly absent is the ability to subscribe to content categories using RSS. I guess this isn’t a huge surprise since few sites, outside of blogs, who target African-Americans actually utilize RSS at all.” This admission is both a confirmation and a disappointment.
My isolated experience on the Web left me frustrated with too many Black Web sites that are essentially demanding that you use a browser re-invented in the 1990s to look at their site instead of a more efficient news feed reader—like Sage in Firefox or Google Reader. In the extreme, this attitude is extremely egocentric and essentially says, “My site is the only site in the world and it demands time-consuming, inefficient, individual attention.” You can even take this to an ironic racist level where you have Black people arguing that other Black people not only are unaware of news feeds but will never learn how to use them.
I appreciate the constructive criticism from Black Web 2.0 that states, “Overall beautiful site but nothing there to make me want to go back or consume the content and brand in other ways like from my fave RSS reader, from my iPhone, etc. Also not so sure the social network is compelling enough to make me that involved in it…”
I know from experience that this way of describing the whack-ass situation at Essence.com will go a long way while my words elect to cut that shit short. My impoverished past in the “ghetto” left me with a vision of Black business as being technically and aesthetically superior to the so-called “white” or mainstream business. Adjusting for scale, we can be technically superior with inferior and out-of-date technology.
When IT technology is used effectively, one kick-ass person can do the work of ten unimaginative losers. When the machines fail, we compensate with soulful human excellence. That’s just how we roll. You want me to sing the Blues into your T1 line to make it run faster? The multi-billion dollar industry of hip-hop started from some dude beating on the hood of an abandoned car in some junk yard in the Bronx. Jimi Hendrix could disassemble his guitar while he was playing it. So I have little tolerance for African mediocrity locked in the missionary position, lit in glossy sepia tones with that orange-brown complexion that is the Essence of some kind of black-plastic Blackness. I don’t “think” we can do better I know we can do better—and this why you are not my friend—with your punk ass. Now go to the store and buy some shoes or something…
Cringely on Leadership and Management
Robert X. Cringely: “Management is telling people what to do, which is a vital part of any industrial economy. Leadership is figuring out what ought to be done then getting people to do it, which is very different. It is a vital part of any successful post-industrial economy, too, but most managers don’t know that.”
“Windows 7 will dump desktop apps for Web versions”
valleywag.com: “The next version of Windows after Vista won’t include Windows Mail, Windows Photo Gallery, and Windows Movie Maker. Instead, Microsoft will offer the Windows Live versions of these apps as optional downloads.” This is one of the few significant, consumer-facing changes Microsoft is making with its entire OS line. Less is more. My captive hope is that Microsoft will find others ways to trim the fat from this Redmond hog. Respect your own Windows Server 2008 team!
iTunes: “Two Years Later, Cover Flow Still Sucks”
Cosmo Catalano: “This problem is complicated by the fact that iTunes is just way too stupid to have the responsibility of assigning songs to albums. Miss a hyphen? A capital letter? Misspell a band name? You’re gonna get three different albums. It’s not that iTunes can’t figure out what art to assign; it just can’t tell that three discs with the same art, title, and band name belong to the same freakin’ album.”