A Browser For Black People?
Monday, December 15th, 2008This rates among the more stupid tech ideas I’ve seen. A company named 40A has released a fork of the open-source Firefox web browers called Blackbird. Okay, choice in browsers is good, and Firefox is a great foundation upon which to build an alternative browser. Blackbird works like just about any other web browser with one important exception:
When using Blackbird’s built-in search feature, results will skew towards African-American news sources and blogs in an effort to highlight those resources.. A search for “Barack Obama” in Firefox’s search box, for example, will bring results like BarackObama.com, Wikipedia, and Chicago Tribune. But the same query in Blackbird’s box will return results from AOL Black Voices and blogs.bet.com.
Ed Young, the CEO of 40A, argues that the browser “isn’t about exclusion, but rather inclusion.” Sorry, but to me, Blackbird exemplifies the latter – a browser that is attempting to more or less isolate a group that comprises as much as 14% of the U.S. population is nothing but a bad idea. And by skewing search results in favor of websites that meet 40A’s criteria – whatever it may be – for being a “good” news site, the company is doing users of the browser a disservice by de-emphasizing other sites.
This country has taken huge strides in doing away with the great racial divide. We’ve elected a black president. 40A has every right to build and market a web browser. But who in their right mind would want to use something that, even if only so slightly, returns us to a segregated society?
