Social networking — the rise of interactive community websites such as Flickr for photos, YouTube for videos, MySpace for everything — has been making its way further into the mainstream over the past year, and as it does so it has been fragmenting to some extent.
Now, instead of a site such as MySpace that appeals (theoretically) to everyone, companies are launching services that focus on a specific community, much like Facebook began by focusing on university students (although it has recently opened up registration to anyone).
One of the newer additions to this group is a Canadian-based website and fledgling community called RapSpace.tv, which — not surprisingly — is aimed at rap and hip-hop fans.
Those who think their beats and raps are the best can upload their videos to RapSpace, at which point users get to vote on which ones they like the best. RapSpace also pulls out and highlights rap and hip-hop videos from YouTube and other video-sharing websites.
The brains behind the site is a guy named McLean Mashingaidze-Greaves, who describes himself as a "geek with dreadlocks."
McLean — or MMG, as some people call him — was once referred to in the Village Voice as a "black Web hero" and "media mogul," in part for his work doing Web development in New York with clients like Sean "P. Diddy" Coombs and Spike Lee. He and his company Virtual Melanin were profiled in Wired magazine in 1997.
McLean has been at the forefront of what some like to call the "user-generated content" or social-media movement since before there even was a YouTube. In 1998, his Web community Cafe Los Negroes was even trying to do streaming video, but eventually shut its doors due to a lack of financing. McLean moved back to Canada from New York to become the mastermind behind a critically acclaimed alternative CBC Web and TV program called ZeD, which solicited video clips (short films, poetry, performance art and music) and broadcast them.
Zed was cancelled last year, but McLean (with partners and former ZeD producers Sue Biely and Sudha Krishna) is trying to carry on the user-generated theme he started there, and aiming specifically at inner-city youth and others who have likely never watched the CBC, and may never have uploaded anything to YouTube.
RapSpace, he says, is an attempt not just to rehabilitate and pay tribute to rap and hip-hop — which McLean believes has gotten stale and formulaic — but also to give kids and other marginalized groups the tools to be part of an online community.
In addition, McLean says the site — whose tag line is "Hip-Hop 2.0" — is offering cash prizes for videos and rap clips that get voted highly by the users at RapSpace. In the future, he says, a winner might even be given the chance to record in a studio or work with an established hip-hop star such as Maestro, the Toronto-born rapper who rose to fame in the 1980s as Maestro Fresh Wes, and is an active member of RapSpace.
One of the interesting features of RapSpace (which launched a beta version in November), is that prospective MCs with a webcam don't have to spend the time saving and uploading their video. RapSpace grabs the video as they perform, encodes it and stores it, then generates a code so the performer and others can embed the video in a web page. And if a rapper doesn't have their own soundtrack or "beat" to rap to, they can pick one from the RapSpace library. The technically ambitious can even use the built-in Web tools to customize a track. McLean says rappers will also soon be able to compete head-to-head with others on the site in real time video contests.
There are other websites focused on the hip-hop community, including one called Crackspace (which is actually a sub-site of a video-sharing service called Hiphopcrack.com), but Mashingaidze-Greaves says RapSpace is different because it is trying to reach out to a community much larger than just the stereotypical "gangsta" audience. One of the recent RapSpace members to get notice from the community, for example, is a young rapper from Dublin, Ireland — and there are video clips being uploaded from rappers in Kenya and other countries as well.
McLean says that RapSpace — which is currently looking for angel investors — will be having a launch event on February 10 at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre that will feature live performers rapping, and will also have people using the site to record and remix while the event is going on.
