It Pays To Be Geek

UPDATE: Brad Spirrison is interviewed about Milt & his new blog. It makes for interesting listening. I encourage you to listen to Going Geek is the New Chic radio interview (5:25 in length).

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Hat-tip to Brad Spirrison for publishing an article on the efforts of one of our past national presidents, article ran in the November 26 issue of the Chicago Sun Times. It talked about the mentoring and education opportunities shared by BlacksGoneGeek for high schoolers looking for IT careers.

Here is what the article had to say:

As chairman of the Corporate Advisory Council for the BDPA Chicago chapter, Milt Haynes works to deliver technical and professional skills to local high school students and the community at large.

"One of my passions is to help students move from the classroom to the boardroom," Haynes said.

After tinkering around with Facebook.com and other social networking tools, Haynes, 55, recently launched an independent, multimedia Web site to showcase the opportunities he sees for African-American IT professionals both locally and nationwide.

Visitors to BlacksGoneGeek will find regularly updated blog posts, podcasts, YouTube videos and an invitation to join a developing community page on Facebook. Haynes also aims to have every blog post include some sort of rich media, which can range from links to Harry Porterfield stories on WLS-TV Ch. 7 to viral videos captured at industry functions via an attendee's cell phone.

"As the community sees that we are connected with these kinds of techniques, there will be more support to build this thing," Haynes said. "With this whole social media phenomenon, you can find out about things that are going on in your own backyard that you never even knew existed."

Haynes added that he has no commercial aspirations for the Web site, but he hopes it can help inspire entrepreneurs to start other businesses in the tech sector.

Milt Haynes is truly a remarkable brother. It will be fun to watch his vision for BlacksGoneGeek.org become reality over the coming weeks and months. BETF-Blog is grateful to Milt as we noticed that he includes us in his tip jar over in the right-hand naviagation bar of his blog.

Have any of our BETF-Blog Readers had a chance to view BlacksGoneGeek yet? If so, what did you think?