This being the first day of the new year around here, I'm going to share a couple of resolutions with you. Afterward I'll be asking for opinions and such.

You've seen some references to the aggregator blog I was playing with, a combination of Feed On Feeds (a server-side RSS/Atom aggregator), and Movable Type, tied together with a hack and a plug-in by Eyebeam R & D. They call it reBlog, it's a beta of a 0.1 version, it's got a couple of kinks I haven't discussed with Eyebeam yet but dammit, it's good enough. So I'm officially starting it up today. It's called Ya Heard?.

If you visited it when I first mentioned the experiment, you may notice a few small changes: no list of blogs being stolen from and no recent posts list. The previous blog list was a rather random extract from my RSS reader. The official list will be grown from blogs with good writing, strong presentations, by Black folks or on topics of special interest to Black folks. The distribution of political positions will be a (significantly) left shifted bell curve and I ain't having just raggin' on Black folks. You can identify error, but if it looks like you're having too much fun doing it, you ain't invited to the party.

I start with news, politics, the stuff I normally do, plus some "demographic-specific" stuff from the rather high-quality (but rather limited) non-news-and-politics Black bloggers I know. Once I get a respectable list in a respectable variety of categories, it will go into the sidebar.

I can use some help identifying aggregation candidates. That's part of what the other site I'm opening up, the Niggerati.net Community Link Forum, is about.

Okay, I'm still kind of foggy on just what the Community Link Forum is about.

The initial idea is to catalog and rate "demographic-specific" sites; that same "by or about" criteria that gets one considered for aggregation in Ya Heard?. Each listing in the database can have a description of up to 1000 characters, can be rated (the classic five stars system) and commented on. You can email the links from the site (I am protected from spamming by a required interval between emails), and report an inappropriate link or comment or user...I will read EVERY report, but I read between the lines and bullshit reports will rebound on the reporter.

You can suggest a link or comment (which I will have to approve without being registered). If you register you can submit a link or comment immediately, edit links and comments you've submitted and suggest new categories or subcategories (which I will have to approve). And if you manage to become one of the Niggerati, say by talking me into letting you run a subcategory, you can do everything but reconfigure the site; all your links, categories and comments post immediately, you can edit or delete the entries you've made.

The closest thing I've seen to the idea behind link forum is About.com, except I'm kind of hoping for some discussion. So I want links to sites and specific articles on the sites. I want to collect a set of useful links and useful opinions about them. I want to find new sites, grass roots sites, and of course new and old bloggers. But the whole concept of the site is still wide open. I can think of several possible directions to go in and I'm really not done configuring yet. But dammit, it's good enough.

Both these projects will evolve, maybe considerably, as the year progresses. P6 went through a number of visual contortion and may well go through one or two more as I (if you'll pardon the expression) integrate my various online activities into as much of a unified whole as possible,