Webbie

Webster Gradney, Jr. (born September 6, 1985), who performs under the mononym Webbie, is an American rapper, songwriter and actor from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He's been signed to the independent Trill Entertainment label since 2003. In 2005 he came into the hip hop scene with "Gimme That" featuring Bun B. His songs "Bad Bitch" and "Swerve" were featured on Gangsta Musik, his 2003 group album with Lil Boosie, and in the 2005 movie Hustle & Flow. Webbie's second album, Savage Life 2, was released in early 2008 with the hit single "Independent" featuring Lil Boosie and Lil Phat.

Early life

Webbie was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His mother died when he was nine years old so his parental care was split between his father and grandmother. Ever since he was five years old, he had been writing rhymes, and throughout his childhood he had become an avid fan of hardcore rap artists including Southern hip hop performers Master P, Eightball & MJG, the Geto Boys, and UGK.

Music career

Webbie first appeared on Lil Boosie's album For My Thugz on the track "Gotta Get It" in 2002. He and Lil Boosie released Ghetto Stories in 2003 and Gangsta Musik in 2004. As Webbie's solo track "Give Me That" featuring Bun B was frequently featured in mixtapes, as a label Trill Entertainment was growing in popularity & was signed for a distribution deal at Asylum Records along with (Webbie). After he was signed there, his major-label debut Savage Life was released in 2005, debuting at number eight on the US Billboard 200 chart.

WebbIE

WebbIE is a freeware web browser designed for screen reader users. It re-presents web pages as text with a caret, allowing users to use their existing screen reader or assistive technology to read it, but is not self-voicing, unlike (for example) Home Page Reader.

History

WebbIE was developed as a student project at the Department of Computation at UMIST. It was first released in 2002 and has been under development and release since. It is often bundled with the LookOUT screen reader and Thunder screen reader.

Technology

WebbIE uses the Microsoft WebBrowser ActiveX control to fetch and parse web pages into the W3C DOM and MSHTML DOM. It then iterates through the DOM creating a text representation. The implications of this include:

WSHH

WSHH is an adult contemporary radio station based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The station, which is owned by Renda Broadcasting, operates at 99.7 MHz with an ERP of 15.5 kW (The lower power is due to the antenna being mounted on an extremely high tower in the area). Its transmitter is co-located with NBC television affiliate WPXI in Pittsburgh.

History

WSHH signed on in 1948 as WJAS-FM, and was a very successful easy listening station during the 1970s and 1980s. During that time, it adopted the current WSHH call letters and Wish brand, even though it didn't adopt the current adult contemporary format until 1989.

The "Wish 100" brand was assumed in the mid-1970s, at a time when easy listening FM stations, once created out of necessity to meet FCC non-duplication requirements, were starting to become profitable. Mostly automated sister stations of AM outlets, usually Top 40 or adult contemporary, easy listening FM stations were cheap to operate, catering to "at-work" listeners with little DJ talk between records.

WorldStarHipHop

WorldStarHipHop is a content aggregating video blog. Founded in 2005, the site averages 1.1 million unique visitors a day. Alexa ranks the site 247th in site traffic in the United States and 983rd for worldwide traffic. The site, operated by Worldstar, LLC, was founded by Lee "Q" O'Denat at 33, a Hollis, Queens-based hip-hop fan, and a dropout from Grover Cleveland High School, who describes himself as a "Haitian ghetto nerd". Described by Vibe as a "remnant of the Geocities generation", the site regularly features public fighting caught on video, music videos and other content targeted to young, black audiences. O'Denat refers to the site as the "CNN of the ghetto." In 2012, Alexa Internet stated "Compared with all Internet users, its users are disproportionately African-American and they tend to be childless, moderately educated men 18–24 who browse from school to home."

History

Lee "Q" O'Denat started the website in August 2005 as a distributor of mixtapes. Shortly after the website's beginning, hackers destroyed the website. O'Denat later restarted it as a content aggregator. Thereon, World Star focused on hip hop beefs, in addition to softcore pornographic video models, which were previously popular through "street DVDs" such as Smack, Cocaine City, The Come Up and other raunchier counterparts. O'Denat used the setup of OnSmash.com, a website which had already been distributing that sort of material. O'Denat said that this led to tension between the two websites. He added "Once we went 100 percent video, showing that original hood stuff, we prevailed."