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I agree that truth can have many facets.

I forgot I added AALBC to my warnerbros mediapass list of platforms. When I went to update my profile today, I went to add it, AALBC.com popped up. It's either an already recognized site or I made it one. Warnerbros.mediapass offers videos, photos, news releases on all their upcoming movies - they also host media junket Q & A... I keep active on the site to see if there are any black movies or black actresses I'd like to feature and promote. All this to say, we writers/journalists can also post enterprising stories on our own site and submit to aalbc for possible publication too!

@Cynique, sure I understand if you, like @Pioneer1, are not convinced about race being an artificial construct. This fiction has been pounded into our heads since it was invented. Sure people can look at people like ay Barrack Obama see that he has some color and put him the in the Black category, based strictly on a 19th-century Americanized evaluation on the way he looks. This of course completely ignores his so-called "white" genetics, but this is not about science. And that is the problem. While we are all indoctrinated about "race" we are woefully ill-informed in science. Look, the typically African American is a pretty genetically diverse lot. So much so, that a Black person can have more in common genetically with a white person that another Black person (but I'm repeating myself). They way we look is a complex combination of ancestry, genetic makeup, gene expression, and environment. Racial classification is purely subjective--because there is no gene for Blackness, or whiteness, or any so-called race. In fact, as I demonstrated with the photo I showed many people defy racial classification. If one's race could be scientifically determined it would be possible to put everyone into a racial category. Race, however, is a necessary tool of the racist to justify explaining why people with more melanin are inferior to people with less melanin. I understand why the racist tries to perpetuate the lie of race, but it is less clear why the victims of racism choose to hold onto this fiction even after it has been scientifically debunked. Pioneer, I'd encourage you or anyone else confused or interested in understanding more about the illusion of race to visit this website . It can explain these scientific concepts better than I. What you choose to believe after that, is up to you.

If every author used the events widget, the authors would benefit, the events would benefit and readers would benefit. I'm not aware of any resource that provides this information so freely. Mel I have almost 3,000 authors on this website. I know I link to at least 1,000 author websites (benefiting their sites more than mine as I have more traffic than 99.9% of them). Now if they all linked back to AALBC.com and generated just 2 visitors to the website a day that would be about 3/4 of a million visitors a year--an extra to this site! That would allow me to finance more and better content and less dependency on the large corporate sites. I'd be able to reach more readers and help them buy the books they will enjoy--everybody wins. It really is just that simple. Jamacia... oh my! @Mel Hopkins, I failed to update the query on the widget I just updated it. Please refresh the page, it is fine now. The Jamaican Festivals (Kingston and Calabash) are not until 2018. But you are correct the widget is a really cool thing. I'll remind people that it is available. By the way, I started adding an icon to the sites most popular pages to make it easier for visitors to share out content via email.

It is possible to remote view and see the future. I have three small.projects. I am going to get an inspired definition of the following: consciousness; time; and God.

Look at 4 visitors coming here from TheLeadStory.org! One of my favorite links to AALBC from The LeadStory is the AALBC book event widget! Every author with a website should at the very least use the AALBC calendar of literary events widget. It is the one widget that promotes other authors, literary events and keeps one abreast of national literary events throughout the year. I just noticed an upcoming event in Jamaica.

The neighborhood analogy works for me. I may actually use it. So many Black websites have disappeared it is not funny. As I've migrated old pages to the new format, Virtually all of the links I had to other sites were broken and in most cases the domains were no longer active. It is astonishing how much Black content has disappeared from the net. Again, I think indie website are the way to go. The list below is traffic from other websites (excluding all search engines) The counts are from my first full day of not posting anything on facebook (March 2 to March 5th. For perspective: More people visited my website from the newsletter I sent this week.than ALL of the sources below combined including Facebook The traffic below is a tiny fraction of the traffic I get from organic search This is also an environment where webmaster simply do not link to other websites. Most of this traffic, like the 27 visitors from Wikipedia are there because I have added content on Wikipedia that links back to AALBC.com. I have not added anything to Wikipedia in over two years but Wikipedia consistently generated more traffic to my site than Twitter, Pinterest and Google+ combined--and I have posted on these sites, daily, for years You see I get more traffic from other sites organically than I get from Facebook. Again I was posting on Facebook daily for years, which doing very little to generate the traffic I got from the other sites. Now imagine a world in which sites like Ebony, Black Enterprise, The Griot actually reciprocated and linked to AALBC.com. Image if every author, publisher, or writer I linked to linked back to at least their page on AALBC.com. The number below would look very different. Today all the links provide and promote, as indie Black sites all goes to social media, but not to ourselves. So my strategy will be to work other websites, the way I did social media. Again if I get more traffic from these sites doing almost nothing than I do from Facebook posting everyday. I should get a better return for my time. Right now spending zero time on social media is a get benefit in and of itself ;-) Count Site 133 facebook 28 l facebook 22 mobile facbook 3 lm facebook 186 Visitors from Facebook 283 Visitors from other sites 27 blog / (not set) 27 wikipedia 20 disq 19 kennesaw 13 twitter 13 madmimi 12 secure-nym 10 pinterest 9 en 9 blavity 7 googleplus 7 aol / organic 6 outlook 5 feedburner / feed 4 theleadstory 4 email12 4 kidrex 4 plus 3 twitter 3 blackboard 2 blakink21 2 aalbc / banner 2 ahrefs 2 blacknews 2 culturalpolitics 2 ecosia 2 email02 2 fortworthtexas 2 iprism / referral 2 jimisound 2 publishersweekly 2 tvtropes 2 welcomewhitefolks 1 wm 1 absolutewrite 1 advertserve 1 api 1 aplanguagemrphillips 1 app2 1 atlantablackstar 1 avg / organic 1 biography 1 blackrefer 1 cafepress 1 chrisdburns 1 cn 1 cuyahoga 1 dailykos 1 de 1 delta-search 1 earl-brooks 1 getpocket 1 goodreads 1 guides 1 harlembookfair 1 hunter 1 images 1 informationvine 1 it 1 izito 1 libguides 1 linkedin 1 lipstickalley 1 mail-attachment 1 mail 1 mail 1 messenger 1 mg 1 mswritersandmusicians 1 olatodera 1 redfordlibrary 1 reference 1 research 1 s1 1 school 1 scs 1 shirleyshowalter 1 theblack-board 1 theblacklist 1 therealmerkabah 1 thereviewreview 1 thumperscorner 1 web03ds 1 wunderlist

"see" is an interesting way to describe energy - I did "see" too but what "saw" wasn't with my eyes. It was more like "seeing" motion in which all were represented. Yes as @Delano mentioned sort of like the sea of tranquilty that spoke as one. Speaking of which, another thing I brought back with me was the ability to use my sense of "feel"... so I wonder if those claims are more that they are able to "feel" their deceased relatives - Like @Cynique mentioned "Words fail us in this dimension. Agreed. It seems magick and spirituality are connected though. My mom said she saw herself hovering over her body. It was during a time she was grieving for my father. Also it wasn't her first time experiencing a projection . When she was younger she saw a man sitting on the wall in her room She said her own projection scared her and I think she willed herself to never allow it happen again. I have a feeling we can literally do all these things but choose against it. In a way, it makes sense how grieving loved ones can follow the one who preceded them in death. The "Give up the ghost" idiom must have started with this type of transition.

I don't think you are. It feels like you are helping us remember to enrich our own property. For example, would I cut my neighbors grass' and allow my lawn to be overrun? Why would allow my property value to decrease and risk a fine? I wouldn't. I'd take care of my property which in turn helps the neighborhood! There are so many abandoned black-owned website's that we've turned the "black web" into a ghetto. Everyone ran to the suburbs of Twitter, Medium and Facebook. But I digress. Mostly, I've been pressing articles that I like to two of my 3 websites and adding my own commentary. I sometimes share articles and info through twitter. I'm on google plus, twitter and I have 5 followers/likes on my facebook "page" (pages can only communicate with pages). I share my blog posts through those platforms and I post directly on my AALBC profile status because I don't have an aalbc social sharing button. When I wrote the commentary/review for "Severed" I linked to @VL Towler's website and her book on Amazon (I'm finally an amazon associates) ... I share aalbc.com discussions on my websites (melhopkins.com/theleadstory.org) and through twitter. AALBC brings traffic to my site as does other websites. In fact, I really like to see that I get traffic from other independent websites. It encourages me to leave my comments on their websites with my website address. As long as the website and its blog remains active I continue to get referrals. The cool thing is I actually took my melhopkins.com website down for a bit. When I put it up on wordpress.com I noticed I was still getting traffic from those websites! As for as searches, yes, SEO is still the best. TheLeadStory.org which is hosted through wordpress.org still gets the most traffic from google and would you believe the second highest is traffic from baidu (the search engine based in Beijing, Peoples Republic of China) ? Maybe you can tell me why? The LeadStory.org is focused on black media consumption and anything related to black community activism through the arts. Also can you answer why is my traffic higher on wordpress.org hosted website than wordpress.com hosted website? Thank you for reading. You touched on a topic that really excites and interest me.

Hey @Mel Hopkins (or anyone), I'm wondering if restricting myself from clicking the social sharing buttons is going too far? Again the data tells me that clicking social sharing button generally has little impact traffic, save the rare instance when something goes viral and results in a surge in traffic. My even questioning whether I should do it is a reflection my conditioning to use social media over the years. Today I posted information about a 9-year-0ld girl you is the youngest #1 bestselling author on AALBC.com . It was one of those things that I would have shared on social media. I thought about clicking one of my social sharing buttons, but decided against it. In 6 months or so I review the impact of not using social media and share it here.