CONGRATULATIONS - and Thank you!

Peace and Blessings,

The 4th Annual Black Web Awards have been a bittersweet experience for me.  2010 marked the end of several fantastic online concepts for the Black community.  A great many Black owned and Black themed blogs and websites ended their online publication or businesses.  This caused required some tough decisions for this year's Black Web Awards.  With 66 categories, longtime supporters will note that this was a more slimmed down version of the awards than in prior years.  For those of you that were wondering, we also decided to remove from consideration those sites which had announced that they had ended their online publication or business, but were still online available as an archive.  We also removed those sites that announced a pending closure.  In both instances, we believed it more to be a more accurate representation of the online Black community.

We were, however surprised by the sheer magnitude of new blogs and sites that launched after the nominees were announced.  If 2008 was the year of the online radio station, and 2009 was the year of the social network, then 2010 was truly the year of the Write In.  Several categories were upended by well organized write in campaigns, producing several surprises in this greatest of online Black "people's choice" awards.  For those of you interested in numbers, there were over 600,000 votes across the 66 categories from over one hundred countries.  Leading vote producing countries included (in no particular order): Great Britain, Jamaica, Ghana, Canada, Nigeria, Japan, China, France, Germany and of course, the United States of America.

It is therefore with great pleasure and much love and respect that I present to you the Winners in the 4th Annual Black Web Awards.  Winners are encouraged to post the above logo on your website.  The URL to link to (or to just copy the logo) is:

http://www.blackwebawards.com/2010/images/BWA_Winner_seal2010.jpg.

We're already planning for the 5th Annual Black Web Awards.  Stop back here on February 1, 2010 to review the schedule.   New for year five you'll see several new and exciting categories, a newly designed website and literally hundreds of never before seen websites, thanks in large part to the launch of our newest and latest project - the Black Search Engine

GatewayBlack.com initially designed to help search out new and exciting Black owned and Black themed blogs and websites worldwide for inclusion in the Black Web Awards.  It now does so, and so much exceeded my expectations that I decided to turn it into its own online resources for everyone.  It has been designed from the ground up to be the First Black Search Engine that Matters.  It comes complete with a range of solutions for today's internet user, and right now is crawling thousands of Black blogs and websites.  It has just begun its' crawling of the web, so if you want to submit your site, please do so at the search engine home page.  You can also learn more about the concept at http://www.gatewayblack.info.

Take care and Stay Aware!

Obi Linton, Esq., Founder
Black Web Awards.com
GatewayBlack.com
BlackTVOnline.com
NigerianTVOnline.com
AskGatewayBlack.com

PS: Don't forget to visit GatewayBlack.com often!

I'm getting the feeling the 5TH ANNUAL BLACK WEB AWARDS are going to be something special....