I was listening to NPR this morning in bed when I heard a program, Obama Hip-Hop: From Mixtapes To Mainstream, on Weekend America Sunday Edition. It talked about the history of hip-hop and its descendant, rap, in the political landscape and what it’s done this election. Guest Mark Anthony Neal is a professor of black pop culture at Duke University and a visiting scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania who spoke about how black America’s first, and usually most vocal response to national happenings was through hip-hop.

There was discussion on the election campaign of Jesse Jackson back in the ’80s and how the music from the black community then and now was different; then there was no one thinking Jackson had a chance, now Obama did, so there was a noted difference on how artists approached the topic. In Jackson’s case, the songs were a protest on the society and social evils that made it so difficult for him to run as a black man, and with Obama, there was hope and a call to join the new revolution of a sorts that was soon to happen.

Rap artist Young Jeezy was interviewed on why he took the time to talk about this issue and why he was with Obama. He also sees Obama as a beacon of hope and his campaign as a sort of salvation for the lower class and African Americans as well as other Americans. His song “Mr. President” in his new album The Recession is dedicated to the President-Elect.

Watch Young Jeezy And Nas Perform ”My President” On Last Call With Carson Daly:

Other songs can be found at the NPR site here.

I was in a discussion with friendfeeders here at about a comment which Robert Scoble tweeted (@scobleizer):

“I wish Twitter had a “retweet button.” For instance, I’d retweet @nytimes stuff a lot.”

Unanimous aggreement preceeded.

If you’re not familiar with Twitter’s user interface, there are two things you can do with other peoples’ tweets on the tweet itself, favorite something, or reply by clicking on the reply button or the favorite button on the right of every tweet.

There’s also another commonly used function, the retweet, which reposts something that you really liked and want to share with others. Essentially, it’s just parroting what someone else said and replying to them so you show your source and give credit. If there was a automatic retweet button on Twitter, you’d click the button, and get something like “RT @username”.

The reply option can be done manually of course, but that quick button is useful, especially when posting straight from the Twitter homepage or using Twitter on a cell phone.

Alot of people will argue that you can just use Twitter clients like Tweetdeck or Twhirl which have this option available…but I think that it should be included in the native Twitter interface, just for the convenience of using it. Plus, it’s kind of a no-brainer; if you’re going to include a shortcut for replying, why not have one for re-tweeting?

We’re pretty much fucked right now. The Dow is dropping faster than a rock-it’s dropped below 10,000 right now. We’re majorly in debt, we owe over $10,000,000,000,000,we’re dropping faster and faster in a recession that’s quickly getting uglier, and people’s retirement and college money is going poof. Of course, companies need to take drastic action, so companies are slashing jobs in record numbers. More banks in Europe are failing, and the buyouts, mergers, and takeovers in America haven’t stopped. Big giants are having to delve deep into their pockets for the easy stuff.

This is not good people. And guess what? This is 3 days since the bailout was passed, of course the Congressmen said they’d edit the law if necessary with a new bill. That time’s drawing closer pretty fast. I’m normally a very rational person. I don’t like to panic. But when you get 5 emails in your inbox in quick succesion from MarketWatch.com, the leading financial commentary site online run by the Wall Street Journal..you get a little freaked out. Particularly when you’re just starting up a new business and freshly entering the stock market.

Admittedly, the web economy has recieved a lesser beating, but it’s still hurting and growing worse. Even the great giant Google’s stock fell drastically.

Expect major financial, more importantly, political upheavals. I’d like to see what happens to China and America during this crisis. It will totally change history.

Only Allah knows what’ll happen.

No hate on Hadithuna of course; when I made this decision, I had to choose one or the other, I decided to do both. Reason? While Wordpress has most of the same features as Hadithuna, it does have a few that I’d like Hadithuna to have that it doesn’t, such as the blog stats. There’s a Google blog tracker you can embed of course, but I like it how Wordpress shows you on login how many visitors you’ve had in a graph format. The argument I had for Hadithuna was that it had a superior support system which I’ve used on a number of occasions and have benefited from. Thanks Suleiman!

So that’s what’s up. Hope you all understand and continue to read both.

I’ve noticed that an uninteded benefit from the current global financial crisis is the fact that it has initiated alot of youngsters like myself (I just turned 15) into the world of finance and money in a way that makes them think about what the hell is going on with the economy, why, how it can be solved, etc. We learn about the economy in the process and become involved in it. Right now even, in about 20 seconds, I just decided to open another flexible savings account that I can execute 2-way transactions with, I picked which stock I want to buy (my dad made me tell 5 reasons why; he’s a banker ;), decided my life career would have something to do with dealing alot with money, and practically decided my college major. Thank you NPR.

Me and my siblings, have now started learning how the economy works and what keeps it running. This has motivated us to get ahead of the curve, and get started right now with the big world of money. Along the way, we’ve learned decision making skills, we’ve had to defend an argument strenuously with facts, and we’ve unanimously concluded the people who traded, loaned, borrowed, and insured these amazingly ridiculous mortgages were all f-ing retards. I think we’re right.

I guess every cloud does have a silver lining afterall :)

I have to say I was quite suprised when I first found about Quranet. A social network for Quran? Novel. And a great idea when you think about it. The other thing that really surprised me was the fact that it was being run by the Israeli government. Naturally, red flags started popping up by the “r” in “Israeli”. It’s hard to gauge if their intentions are sincerem, really. Officially the site isn’t even up yet for some reason or other. I’m taking this chance to list my favorite Quran applications online, as well as one desktop app that I just can’t leave out:

1. QuranFlash

2. Quran Recitor

3. Online Tafsir

4. Juz30

5. Noble Quran by Islamasoft

Here’s the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affair’s article about it and an informative flash presentation:

For the second year in a row, the Southern Minnesota chapter of BDPA dominated in the annual HSCC computer competition and came 1st place baby! w00t! All that studying and practicing all over the town was worth something then ;)

Props to Zack and the whole team for making this a reality. You guys (and gals, Lauren :) really do rock. Proof is in the fact that no one came even close to our scores. Come check us out here and see how we’ve done in the past; inshallah, we’ll continue in our success.

Shout out to Ebrahim and my cuz in the pic. We really rocked that last night at the banquet! Unfortunately, we’ll be missing two integral parts of our team of the last few years; Lauren Pemberton and Kunle Roberts. I’ll really miss you guys and I hope you do well at Rice University. I’ll try to keep Ahmed under control and I’ll make sure to always invoke the 65% rule whenever the chance arises (2EZ), lol.

Final Salute, team:

Viewzi is unique because it lets you first of all choose from a variety of search views. These include and mp3 Search View, Celeb Photo View, TechCrunch Search View, Web ScreenShot View, as well as many others.

It get’s better though. For example, you can see in the Detailed Information View a general site information summary and traffic drawn from places like del.icio.us, Alexa PageRank, and Google. It also shows recently overheard search results from Twitter!

Because of it’s ease of use and great features, Viewzi will become a hit for anyone who wants a better searching experience. Of course, you might think there’s the factor of pages indexed and all, but that doesn’t really matter, because it’s all limited to a certain number of sites that Viewzi searches like TechCrunch, or major news sites. This might hamper it’s usability, but considering that many search results can be found at these sites, I say who cares.

You have to remember though for more and better search results, you’re going to have to stick with Google.

I first saw this on hiphopmusic.com from SocialBrowse. It was submitted by a commenter that goes by the name of “as” on July 31, 2008 at 2:20. Thought I might share it with you guys. Ludacris’ lyrics plus the video can be found above from the link to hiphopmusic.

I’m back on it like I just signed my record deal
Yeah the best is here, the Bentley Coup paint is dripping wet, it got sex appeal
Never should have hated, You never should’ve doubted him
With a slot in the president’s iPod Obama shouted ‘em

Said I handle my biz and I’m one of his favorite rappers
Well give Luda a job make me a special staffer
Better yet put me in office, make me your vice president
Hillary hated on you, but the Clintons are so irrelevant

Jesse talking slick and apologizing for what?
If you said it then you meant it no ifs ands or buts?
And all you other politicians trying to hate on my man,
watch us win majority vote in every state on my man

You can’t stop what’s bout to happen, we bout to make history
The first black president is destined and it’s meant to be
The threats ain’t fazing us, the nooses or the jokes
So get off your ass, black people, it’s time to get out and vote!

Black man in the White House, I’m sure that’s got ‘em terrified
McCain don’t belong in any chair unless his doctor verifies (he’s old)
Yeah I said it and Bush should have convulsions
Reading ‘My Pet Goat’ and STILL looking for weapons of mass destruction
When FOX is talking I hear nothing even relevant
Dubya is the worst of all 43 presidents

Get out and vote or the end’ll be near
The world is ready for change because Obama is here
’cause Obama is here
The world is ready for change because Obama is here, yeah
cuz Obama is here

Posted by email from genieyclo’s posterous

I don’t know if anyone’s noticed this startup by the name of Project Playlist, which calls itself a Social Music Experiment. It basically follows the whole music+social interface scheme alot of the music sites have adopted like imeem or last.fm. In playlist’s story, you signup and search for music. In the search results page, you see a listing of all the resulting songs with a little flash player by each song that plays the song when clicked on. Along with the usual stuff listed with each song is something that I personally was flabbergasted at first to see. They put the URL of each and every mp3 song they have on their listings. Note: the songs are not in like a database of their own, but picked from across the web. Picture what this has in store for record sellers. Yeah, FAIL. Take a look for yourself. Anyone can download as many songs as they want–and remember that they’re all in good mp3 quality.

Kinda hard to see where this goes though, seeing that soo much music is pirated these days. Bittorrent has made this especially easy, as has email and host of other technologies. Out of this whole affair, you either get some very happy social-media consumers and a very happy Project Playlist, or the gallows will be pulled out for the easier to take care of, which is ofcourse, the latter.

Anyways, when you see a track you like, you can add it to a playlist of yours. Playlists are in flash format, but you can also get them as .m3u and standalone flash or .ram

What I’m wondering is, however, how they managed to catalog so much music like this. idk, but it must be pretty ingenious.