It’s a soft launch tonight for the ProHipHop News Center.

Everything is ready except for the custom search engines and they should be done by daybreak EST.

Then it’s the hard launch coming at you!

Hmmm, that doesn’t sound quite right but there will be a press release and I’ll have things to say in a ProHipHop post and so forth and so on.

Till then.

Update:
5:30 am and I was a half hour from being done when Typepad goes down for an hour.

So much for web services, SAAS, computing in the cloud and so forth.  For the consumer, mission critical web apps are still a long ways away.

Let’s hope it’s up long enough so I can finish the stupid search engines for this stupid news center.

Update 2:
I think I’m done with this first round but I can’t tell.  Let me know what you think, folks, when you have a moment.

Update 3:
Now that I’ve had some sleep I wanted to drop a quick note about what’s up with the News Center.

I will be reaching out to folks that are included so they know they’re in there but if you don’t want to see your feed included, write me and I’ll remove it ASAP, no questions asked.  That’s your right even if you’ve made a feed freely available to the world:
clyde(at)prohiphop(dot)com

I am running only partial feeds and the only live links are back to the original posts.  Even though a lot of these people put out full feeds with graphics, that’s not something I would ever use without permission.

I’m going to officially launch next week just because of how the pr and general attention cycle works.  Plus, that part’s a lot of work as well and deserves some focused attention.

Beyond that I’ll be tweaking what’s up, adding more to some of the thinner sections and introducing new sections as well.  That will mean both more hip hop resources as well as more categories in general.  I’m definitely open to suggestions but I’m also building in relationship to what you could the ProHipHop Universe of Awareness, i.e. this is what I keep up with or would like to keep up with to follow both hip hop and the ever changing social and business climate in which hip hop operates as so many of our activities move online.

I know not everybody will dig the format cause we all like to get info in our own ways but it’s already affected my news gathering and given me a deep resource to browse to see what other bloggers are up to.  So I’m quite happy with it and hope it can give folks another news option for regular use or for simply discovering sources and feeds for use elsewhere.

Related ProHipHop Coverage:
ProHipHop Launches the ProHipHop News Center Featuring Top Entertainment, Lifestyle and Business News Blogs