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Rushmore Drive is a new search engine designed to return results targeted to black people. CEO Johnny Taylor explains why segregated search makes sense and web entrepreneur Omar Wasow gives a status report on the state of the black internet.
Johnny Taylor referred to a science fiction writer and an unevenly distributed future. The sci-fi writer is William Gibson.
"The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed." -- William Gibson, 30NOV99 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1067220
-- SCAM
so-called "Austin Mayor"
http://austinmayor.blogspot.com
good god, call it for what it is, the racist internet. sometimes its not white people that can't get past race, it seems that some black people want to turn even the internet which is a place devoid of skin color into something racially segregated.
For research purposes both Black Planet and Rushmore Drive sound like they can be an asset for people seeking information related to the African diaspora online. I am pleased that some small business group has moved in this direction before a huge media conglomerate did.
This was a great story, but I kept waiting for the question I would have asked. Mr Taylor explained that Rushmore Drive favors sites regularly viewed by black web users. How is the race of the web user determined? Does my computer know what I look like?
I find Rushmore Drive to be typical of the double standard we see in this country. If in the interview, the word "black" were replaced with "white" or "Caucasian" as appropriate, the resulting hysterics calling Rushmore Drive a White Supremacy & a hate web site would be deafening.
So, what I would like to know, when Johnny Taylor said that Home Depot could "have penetration in the black space" and continue to "come on the front page" of the results - was he grinning? What was going on there? I think perhaps On the Media has been played.
Kevin McKague has got to be kidding. These machines and the Internet have a pretty clear view of who is operating them, what they look like, what they buy, who they communicate with. Profiles of all of us are building nanosecond by nanosecond. We're being reduced to numbers and statistics but we're targeted.
Yeah, there is a racial overtone to these things but it sounds a far cry from the real white supremacy or hard core Islamic fundamentalists' sites. It is the Internet equivalent of Jet magazine.
Ok, ok, move along. Nothing to see here.
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