Troy

@Xeon, despite my comment I've long since stopped thinking of biopics as documentaries. Biopics are designed to make money. Any resemblance to the truth is incidental. @CDBurns, sure if you'd beat up a woman you are a punk. Punks also run around firing weapons to compensate for being a punk. @Delano, The artist and the man are all the same. If it is true that he was running around shooting people and beating up women. I think society would be better off without him, and his music. Too often was are willing to gloss over violence perpetrated celebrities because it does not touch us personally. If Miles Davis, Bill Withers, O.J. Simpson, Chris Brown or anyone of these celebrity thugs beat up my daughter, society would not have to worry about them very long.

I discovered several years ago that Amazon does not always have the best prices. I wanted to buy a replacement filter from my coffee machine and I went to Amazon the price was over $50 for 1 filter. I thought that price was outrageous, O si searched from the product online and I found a website selling two filters for $25 dollars. From that day to this I never buy anything on Amazon with checking the web first. I usually find lower prices on the web. I have been look for a new pair of shoes recently. I checked Amazon and various websites. As a result I'm inundated with shoe advertisements as I browse the web. I popped into my local DSW store and found exactly what I wanted on the discount rack for 30 bucks a full $100 less that the online prices I was seeing for comparable shoes. If Amazon puts DSW, or other physical shoe stores, out of business because people are too lazy to go to the store, do we think we ultimately end up with better prices? Amazon has deluded people into believing that; (1) they have the best prices; (2) that they are actually comparison shopping when using market place; (3) that every retailer is on Amazon; and (4) that getting a product immediately is always better.

Well maybe I'm not that obscure. Seriously, Troy Johnson is a very common name and there are a several people in the public eye with the name, so ranking high on a search for my name is not easy--especially if you do not want social media to win. I put effort into making this happen. Ranking high in search does not happen automatically. Let me look into the image upload settings-- I thought they were pretty liberal.

The Wall Street Journal article is behind a paywall. However, it appears the article has been OCR'ed and converted to an audio file on Youtube. The crazy thing is thing is that the prices will be the same as they are on the Amazon website! How can they do it? Thank Wall Street. I wonder if they will have cafes and provide free WiFi like other so called bookstores? Will the employee just be low-level cashiers or knowledge sales people? I think Barnes and Noble can pretty much say goodnight The stick price is down 7% on this news, Nooks sales are down 25%, stores sales are down. You know I have to remove my Barnes and Noble buy links from this website because they killed their affiliate program for the 3 or 4th time since I've been running this site!

Oh I forgot to mention this: After seeing how search results skewed away from independent website--especially black owned sites. I decided to create search engine, Huria Search, that only returns search results from Black owned independent website. That way so many of the websites that are undiscoverable in regular search can now be found in a Huria Search. Check out the Huria Search results on Zane. The query is actually on the term Zane Author. You will see now that the top results come from Black Enterprise, Black America Web, Black News.com, and Jet Magazine. But the top pages in the search results ALL talk about scandal associated with Zane tax issues. In fact these are all the same articles--regurgitated clickbait designed to drive traffic. It is not until we get to Hello Beautiful site, #6 in the results, that we see information about Zane's literary or film accomplishments. AALBC.com is excluded from Huria Search results. One last note: A couple of years ago my social media started beating MY SIte on a query of my name! I went into Facebook and Twitter and ripped out all of my personal information and lied about anything I had to provide, like my age (I'm over 100 on Facebook). It took another year for my site to out rank my social media on Google Searches. This was probably due to an adjustment of Google's side rather than my own effort. How does AALBC.com rank when you run a search on Troy Johnson AALBC? Let me know, I'm curious.

I have to check out your video @CDBurns. @Mel Hopkins, Google's search results OFTEN push "official sites lower in search results." They will absolutely favor social media, wikipedia, scandalous news, etc over an official site, which is a serious problem for smaller sites, regardless of quality. Consider an article I wrote about the search results on the author Zane, back in 2014 Now I will admit that Google has gotten better over time and the problems that I noticed a few years ago are not nearly as bad. But this is mostly because it is much more difficult to game Google's search results. Still small books sites don't really have a chance today. Take a look at the screenshot from Google search result that I posted below (taken at 10:00 a.m. February 2, 2016 using privacy mode) Notice how Google inserts their Zane information prominently on the upper right hand side of the search results page. Actually it is not "their" Zane information, in that the text is usually copied from Wikipedia and the images are copied from other websites including this one. As a result, people looking for something about Zane do have to leave the google page, Google is also a book seller, so people can learn more about books and buy them from Google without even leaving the search results page! Wikipedia is #1 (no surprise there--Google oddly skews toward wikipedia on virtually every subject). Simon and Schuster has the first and 2nd search results. Amazon's has two sites in the top 7. AALBC.com is #7 in the results. Your result will vary especially if you login to Google. When I login, for example, AALBC.com comes in #3 for this Zane search. Zane's Blog is on page 2. Admittedly Zane's Blog has not been updated since 2012, instead she is hyper-active on social media. I think it is a mistake for Zane to publish so much content on Facebook, rather than her own website. Indeed it was her website that launched her prominence. But Zane is famous and has earned millions. I'm obscure and broke, so what do I know? As Google becomes more of a content aggregator they can hijack the traffic that would have normally gone to other websites, because they own search. Facebook is positioning themselves quite well to do that same thing. Facebook and Google are oligarchist gatekeepers.

OK I'm glad the image insertion is now working. That was a problem before I migrated the board to the new server. Yes this young lady has gained a lot of attention as of late. Her Mother, Dr. Janice Johnson Dias' not-for-profit, GrassROOTS Community Foundation (cofounded by Black Thought of the Roots) is her platform. Their not-for-profit has substantial corporate backing; supporters include Red Bull (who knew?) and many others. GrassROOTS (you know the "ROOTS" name just now dawned on me..duh), seem to be doing great things in Philly.

Mel when I first populated the blog directory I used those Black Blogs award sites as a source. The fact that many of the award winning blogs listed on those sites are no longer up, only supported my belief that we had to do more to support each other--that is if we have any interest in long term survival. I have already emailed all of the bloggers in my database. I was unable to generate any interest in doing anything collectively. I did connect with a group of bloggers (a group whose name I will not mention), but the members seem to be more interested in using the platform to promote their own sites rather than brainstorming ways to work together for mutual benefit. Getting folks to sacrifice a bit of their time to work with others is a very hard thing to convince people to do--even if they will benefit in the long term. I continue to try... Once this website's upgrade is complete (still several months away), I will redirect energies to more collective efforts. BTW if anyone notices any other problems on these forums please let me know. It appears all of the bugs have been worked out.

I'm not sure why this image is not displaying. Did it ever display properly?

There is a saying, "When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible." The Black religious experience is much older that what we see in America today. There are some who feel the religion as it was "given" to the enslaved African was a tool to placate them. Harry Brown is far from alone in his sentiment. During a King celebration I heard Rev. Mike Walrond speak, and he was very critical of ministries that were more concerned with enriching their pastors and accumulating material things, rather than serving the people. Also, it is no secret that there were many in the Black church that were not supporters of Dr. King, when he was most active -- even up to the point when he was killed. So while the Brothers and Sisters in The Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam and other groups disagreed with King on tactics, they were clear on one thing; the oppression had to stop. So while white racist clearly don't want Black unity, I would not suggest that the Black Church is the only institution Black American has that can bring us unity. No one institution can.

I'm doing my best to remedy them.

Well I have to bend to you knowledge on the subject of AKA's @Mel Hopkins, as mine is the perspective of a dude looking in from the outside. Clearly you are aware of the stereotypes associated with AKA and how they contrast to say Zeta's, or how how the stereotypical Alpha stands in stark contrast to say an Omega.

Mel, I'm afraid no one would distribute or consume the list, so I'm not sure it is worth the effort. I'm not taking the idea off the table, but it is definitely way on the back burner. You can add your blog to the list using this form: http://aalbc.org/blogs/addnewblogform.html these are the blogs whose feeds I would aggregate. Don't stress over the categories I'm going to recategorize all the blogs and when I review the list later in the year.

Nate Parler Interviewed on Birth of a Nation October 2016

I plan to migrate this discussion forum to a new webserver. This change is part of the AALBC.com upgrade. For the last couple of months I'v been maintaining two versions of this website AALBC.com and AALBC.org. This is starting to become problematic for me. In a world where I have all the resources I needed to do the website upgrade properly, I would be able manage both sites make the switch to the new version of AALBC.com virtually seemless, sort of like flipping a switch. Alas, this poor webmaster does not have that luxury, so I've decided to simply point everything to the new version of AALBC.com. This means for several months the website will display pages with old versions and new versions of the website. Sure this will not be the best experience for visitors, but it will be A LOT easier for me to manage. It will also be much better for SEO, as AALBC.org is showing up in search results and thereby weakinging AALBC.com. That is probably a bit more detail than most of you needed, or desired, but I know there will be small percentage of people who might find my reasoning of interest so I figure I'd share it. The discussion forum is really a standalnoe website, it does not share the same database as AALBC.com proper but since I did not build the database migrating it is a bit tricky, since I don;t know everything that needs to be done to make it work properly--there are just a lot of moving parts. Hopefully, there will not be to many problems.

I think the little boy who played in Beasts of No Nation should have been nominated too. It is hard for me to get worked up about the state of Black film given the state of Black books and journalism. I never watch the Academy Awards program, so it is hard for me to care very much about it. It is celebrity driven and in many ways I think our culture is too focused on celebrity as it is. Perhaps Chris Rock will say something to support his brother and sisters. It is not enough for me to tune in though, cause I know whatever he says, that is relevant to the cause, will be on the web 5 seconds later. When (if) that happens I'll grab it off Youtube and post it here. Otherwise I'm sure I'll have nothing to contribute to the conversation about a white award program designed to celebrate the accomplishments of other white people.

Social media acting as the mediary IS the problem with social for businesses @Mel Hopkins I think the only reason people believe this is better is because I that never known anything else. My 20K+ followers are useless to me. I'm not saying my individual followers are useless themselves, it is that they are useless to be in terms of my ability to reach them. Facebook will not show them my posts, Facebook will not allow me to message them or any any way contact them directly. My mailing list is far more effective. If only 15% of my mailing list opened my email, that is far better than the reach I can get with Facebook. Needless to say my website itself is even more effective than my mailing list. This is not anecdotal this is a simple fact. Mailing lists and websites are more effective than social media. Despite that authors in particular are abandoning websites and making the Facebook pages their primary web presence. Even the ones who have websites invest all their time trying to grow an audience on social media rather than growing an audience for their own websites. In fact authors truth be told could actually use this platform to much better results than social media... @CDBurns I actually understand what my man is asking regarding the sneakers :-) But we could go back and forth with the emails and messages man. I would'nt even have to got to my racist hate messages. But seriously it is not all that bad on my end, I guess cause I'm used to it. But that email stuck me as a bit much LOL.

Chris the skull and bones is the joke. I dunno who make the graphic. I just thought it was funny.

Ok there has been some movement of the Birthday Cake for George Washington. The publisher updated the book cover to more accurately reflect sentiments of his slaves.

“I stumbled across your website and I'm wondering if you can help me. I read a book a couple of months ago and I'm wondering if you can give me any suggestions about how to go about finding this book I do know that is written by a black author but I don't know the name of the book and I don't know the name of the author is there a way that you may be able to help me? I look forward to hearing from you.” My initial reaction was to suggest some Ginkgo biloba, Now 30 years ago, I might have been able to help; maybe even run the titles off the top of my head. I replied respectfully. Don't ask me why..

Ten Steps to Promote Diversity in Children‘s Literature

What does a blog series look like? I believe I may already be doing this to a certain extent.

To be fair mainstream publishers have published a bunch of books where Black folks have been the ones to turn around a school. But lately the focus is profiting off dysfunction. So I agree your story would probably not get published today.

If he is not I am.

...of course we have all heard this story before. It was recently covered in my hometown newspaper, the New York Post with a title reflecting the sensibilities of New Yorkers, "My year of terror and abuse teaching at a NYC high school." The article goes on to relate; In 2008, in a fit of idealism, Ed Boland, a well-off New Yorker who had spent 20 years as an executive at a nonprofit, had a midlife epiphany: He should leave his white-glove world, the galas at the Waldorf and drinks at the Yale Club, and go work with the city’s neediest children. In the end, Boland isn't hoisted on his students' shoulders and no one passes AP anything. This is no urban fairy tale of at-risk kids saved by a Hollywood hero, but a searing indictment of schools that claim to be progressive but still fail their students. Told with compassion, humor, and a keen eye, Boland's story is sure to ignite debate about the future of American education and attempts to reform it. The article, and I presume the book, goes on to describe case after case of dysfunction, presented our amusement. The school of course is not a regular school; the students all seem to have profound problems. At the end of the day, the rich white guy was obviously unqualified to instruct these students. After a few months of failure he then secures a book deal, plenty of media coverage, and make even more money. I wonder if he ever considers how the school year he spend with those students was wasted. I'm sure this guy was raised reading books like, A Birthday Cake for George Washington.