Hip-Hop 101.. and then some

Because hip-hop isn't the type of music I generally like or listen to, I decided to look at and evaluate Wisconsin State Journals interactive website Hip-Hop 101 and see how much time I would spend on the page. Hip-hop 101 won the Online News Associations Journalism Award for Outstanding Use of Digital Media for a small publication in 2007.

Hip-Hop 101 is a page intended to educate people about hip-hop and the activities of the hip-hop community in the Madison area. On the site’s home page, hip-hop is described as being more than just music, it is described as a culture. For this reason, I think it is very fitting that WSJ chose to cover this story in a non-traditional way. Because hip-hop is not just music, but fashion, breakdancing, DJing, MCing, poetry, and beatboxing as well, it seems right that different multimedia vehicles should be used to cover the different elements of this culture.
Though the website is chock-full of content, it is presented in a very simple and easy to navigate yet innovative fashion.

The links section of the website has been cleverly designed into a spinning album with the links circling on the record. For some reason I did find myself more inclined to click on all the links because they were presented in this way. If the links alone were presented so creatively I found myself wondering how the actual topics linked to would be covered.

After visiting all 5 links: DJing, MCing, graffiti, breakdancing, and poetry, I had barely noticed I had passed nearly 20 minutes perusing the site. Because all of the subjects weren’t simply covered using text but video and slideshows as well, I found myself more interested. Naturally when the subject is dancing or rhyming, these are more effective and interesting when actually heard and seen. The DJing link even had a little game in where the user could scratch their own beat.

I also liked the section where different artists described on video what they thought hip-hop was. This gave the story a personal element to it, and also made it more interesting to me.
Overall I thought the website did a good job of balancing a good amount of information and interactive features, or relaying one through the other. For example, as oppose to simply writing out a timeline of hip-hops history, the time line was presented in the form of a turntable and sliding the different bars along provided more information.

I thought the site was very effective in being both informative and interesting because I wasn’t initially very interested in the topic of hip-hop, but through using the different multimedia features I in turn learned more about the culture.