Once upon a time as a young man I was one of the leading online proponents of a number of items on the pro-black agenda. Now I'm a middle aged curmudgeon who's generally unimpressed with the public discipline, interest and capabilities in such matters and Cobb is something like my fifth or sixth website. It occurred to me in responding to Nulan this morning that I might be more forthcoming about this history. There are, after all, occasional clueless noobs who stumble upon Cobb thinking that I was perhaps born yesterday with no black pride whatsoever. In fact, I'm something of an ultimate insider, and I do respect my history. So I have decided I should bequeath them to the new, more interactive web. Because if there is anything more tiresome than being a collector of bad news, it is doing the job solo with very little fanfare or recognition.
I would expect right now that there are approximately two joints on the whole of the internet who would sustain the audience and desire to continue the mission I abandoned many years ago, to be the site of reference to the slings and arrows that black American life is heir to. Those two sites would be Dell Gines and Prometheus 6, neither of which appears to much enjoy the fact that they have to take my Cobbism seriously. But when it comes down to it, we're all more or less from the same side of the tracks and I couldn't bear being in a world without them. I have seriously raised the question as to whether there should be a single black multi-author blog, and on my way to doing what I'm about to do, I want to say something important.
America is a worse off place because the Black Hole didn't happen. The Black Hole was going to be the multiauthor black blog of record. When it was concieved, we would have had basically the original members of The Conservative Brotherhood, along with Prometheus Six and the members of Vision Circle including Temple3, Nulan, Myself, Ed Brown and Dr. Spence. I suspect we might have also gotten EJ Flavors, Jimi Izrael and George Kelly too, and who knows who else might have joined the fray. But we didn't do the Black Hole for a number of good reasons. That was then. This is now. I'm only saying damn in retrospect, rather in the same way one on occasion misses the huge black hollywood movies like Bingo Long, or Coming To America, or Carmen Jones.
Speaking of which, who the hell is ever going to write *the* romantic comedy for Denzel and Halle before they get old and wrinkly? Is everybody out there completely asleep? Surely they didn't think 'Breakin All The Rules' was going to suffice.
Anyway, back to the subject at hand, which is, who in their right mind would take the minor masterpiece that was Black Hell, and update it for Web 2.0? More particularly, who will assist in funding such a project to the tune of about 175 dollars for one year of Typepad so that it has a home. Because, quite frankly talk is cheap and bandwidth is not free. Ordinarily, I'll pull down a few bills from the Kwaku Foundation and do it myself, but that's not what Web 2.0 is all about. I already did Black Hell, myself. This is about concerned African Americans in the whole of the blogosphere doing something collaboratively.
I've always expected that there would be a talented collective of blackfolks on the web who might do something like this, and perhaps they did too. I hope this serves to remind us that we haven't. As usual, I will commit the necessary technical assistance as required, should interest be forthcoming. If not, then whatever.
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