Archive for the 'New Features' Category

Since Thursday I’ve been checking espn.com every hour to check the scores for the tournament games. I made a pool on Facebook called Raymond’s Pool of Pools (I’m vain, I know). Some of the Connect’rs are on it. I think Kaiser forgot to fill out his bracket, but his wife remembered. Right now, Sumaya is in first, but that won’t last very long. She picked Duke and Notre Dame to go to the Final Four.
Anyway, the reason I’m even talking about this is because it gave me some time to do mindless work during commercials. So I came up with this…

Yes, you see correctly. I’ve starting developing a toolbar. This isn’t anything high tech. It looks bad right now. I’ll have Kaiser make the graphics better. We’ll come out with a beta or something soon. It’s integrated with Google and everything, so you can sync it up with your Gmail. I know there’s some diehard TCC fans out there wanting this. We’ll keep you posted!

We’ve quietly launched our South Asian blog. Titled “The DesiConnect Blog,” we’re still trying to come up with something a little bit more creative…Okay, A LOT more creative.

So why the blog? We wanted a couple things. We’re a weekly publication, and we noticed people come to the site everyday. So why not have content that’s added daily? We didn’t want more interviews to publish. We already have a staff of 30 that research and interview the people we profile. We went out and sought out some bloggers. Now, we didn’t just want any blogger. All of our bloggers are more than well-equipped to write on the topics they’ve chosen. Something else we wanted from The DesiConnect Blog is a chance for you, the reader, to interact with our content. Feel free to comment on the posts and start a discussion. Someone’s gotta do it, so start!

We plan on sending out a dedicated email announcing The DesiConnect Blog. Right now, we have one post, but by the end of the week, you’ll see all our different bloggers. I’m really excited about this!

So the next question is…Why a blog only for The DesiConnect? We definitely plan on launching blogs for the other magazines. Right now, we have a full plate. Next month we plan on launching, as Sumaya mentioned in her post, The AfricanaConnect. We’re very excited about that! It’s been in the works for a long time, but we’ve been waiting to get the right people involved. We have a wonderful staff working on it. Also, next month we’re launching a news portal. I don’t want to get into much detail on it right now, but it’s going to be replacing the “news2know” section that you get on your weekly emails. I know a lot of you read it, but I promise you, you won’t be disappointed with what we have in store. Once that gets situated, I’ll be recruiting a staff of bloggers for the other magazines.

Okay, I know there’s more questions you have. It’s late though, and I’m tired. So, if you have questions, feel free to ask me.

When we launched our Founders blog, Raymond was the face that you saw on many of the blog posts. However, lately people have noticed that he’s been a little M.I.A on the blog - so what’s the deal? It’s all pretty exciting really - he’s been heading up a few new and very big projects with Kaiser to bring new meaning to the Desi community blogosphere and a shared news portal for all of our e-magazines and websites.

While they work around the clock to redefine and bring more value to what we offer you at The CulturalConnect, I’ve been working with a newly created team (Elisha, Tunde, Bukola and Elizabeth) to prepare for the launch of The AfricanaConnect (will be our fifth e-magazine and website) in early April.

It’s been a little tiring to get all of this done in a short period of time - but fortunately for us - we love it so stay tuned, we promise a lot of new stuff we can’t wait to get your feedback on.

It’s time to hit the refresh button because there are new things going on.

In preparation for something special this week, we’ve updated the look of the blog and added some new things on the side (recent posts and comments) and at the bottom of each post (links for Digg, del.icio.us, Facebook, and Send Page to Friend).

Also, the common icons throughout the site have gotten a much-needed touch-up (might need to refresh on a non-blog page to see it). They make me happy now.

Farewell, old design…