Tag Archives: Firefox

An African-American web browser???

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Uncertain of what to give your Liberal friends this year? How about Blackbird, a web browser for African-Americans.

Perhaps because we have our first African-American president* or perhaps just because they could,

download_blackbird6“Blackbird was developed on the simple proposition that we, as the African American community, can make the Internet experience better for ourselves and, in doing so, make it better for everyone. Primarily we believe that the Blackbird application can make it easier to find African American related content on the Internet and to interact with other members of the African American community online by sharing stories, news, comments and videos via Blackbird.“

Blackbird is basically Firefox with a few goodies added:

  • a news crawl with Black focused news stories (today’s list includes Oprah’s weight gain* — surprise!), Obama, University of New Mexico hiring an African-American head coach for football,  Black men who portray Santa, Condi Rice, unemployment stats, and the Tuskegee Airmen being invited to the inauguration)
  • A list of online video channels pre-set with five African-American focused feeds.
  • A bunch of bookmarks to sites like AOL Black Voices, BlackPlanet.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, BlackWeb2.0, Time and USAToday (in case you were wondering what the MSM of that community was), as well as HBCs (Historically Black Colleges) and SoulTrain.com

Know this: I am totally in agreement with the fact that the MSM is basically white, male, hetero when it looks at the news.  No way do most of those stories make it into the paper/broadcast (except Oprah’s weight). My real problem with Blackbird is the precedent. Soon everyone will have  browsers tailored to only telling them what someone else thinks they are interested in. MORE NICHES!!! That’s what the world needs!!!

With that in my mind I am preparing to release a series of ever more specialized browsers.

  • Quetzalcoatl: For Mexican-Americans
  • Flamingo: For Gay-Americans
  • BigBird: For Children-Americans For West Indies cricket fans (see comments)
  • DoubleEagle: For Austro-Hungarian-Americans
  • BlindEagle: For FoxNews-Americans
  • FlipTheBird: For Boston-Americans
  • LarryBird: For Boston-Celtic-Americans
  • BirdDog: For Canine-Americans
  • FriedBird: For Cannabis-Americans
  • BirdBrain: For Cranky-Blogger-Journalist-Americans

*Bad timing to this ad which popped up on Gmail today: “Orprahs Flat Belly Rule: – Oprah-Diet-Free.com – Lose over 10lbs every week when you obey Orprahs 1 rule. Free trials!” (all typos from the original)

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