Web Pioneer Lynne d. Johnson

Photo credit: Cecily Walker

"It's difficult for me to imagine the web without Lynne," said black gay blogger J. Brotherlove of Lynne d. Johnson. He echoes the sentiment of many folks of all colors who have been movers and shakers online since the first website went online in 1991.

Johnson, who is currently editor and community director at FastCompany.com, is an out African-American technology expert with a hip-hop sensibility, an encyclopedic knowledge of music, killer fashion sense and an afro-futuristic outlook. It is no wonder that A-list bloggers have no qualms showering her with well-earned accolades.

"When I think about black females on the web with technology, Lynne's name easily comes to mind," said Karsh, founder of the Black Weblog Awards and blackgayblogger.com. "She has masterfully been able to understand and bridge the gap between online and print media in a major way, from her work with Vibe magazine to her current work at FastCompany."

Born in the late 1960s, Johnson grew up in the birthplace of hip-hop, the Boogie Down Bronx. That music, she wrote on her blog in 2002, "is woven into the fabric of her existence. … There she Patty Duked and Smurfed to whatever the DJ scratched scientific, while the MC waxed poetic."

But don't be fooled into thinking that her old head hip-hop outlook confines her musical sensibilities. Along the way Johnson has also developed a deep appreciation for "underground punkdafiednewavism" and an eclectic array of other types of music that she parlayed into becoming a respected music reviewer.

Her love affair with technology began when she was a high school student in the mid-1980s and began programming on a Commodore 64. Being a computer geek in hip-hop's epicenter had a profound effect on Johnson.

"Hip-hop was all around me," she said. During that period she began hanging out with rappers, sometimes spitting her own rhymes, and eventually becoming a respected spoken-word artist, performing at such hallowed venues as the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Her poem "The Flow," a tight piece evoking the history and rhythms of hip-hop, was published in Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam alongside heavy hitters June Jordan and Amiri Baraka.

As a young adult weaving in and out of the world of rap, Johnson was not open about her sexuality with her peers, who were mostly young black and Latino men with whom she forged strong bonds — her running buddies. She was accepted as one of the crew. She was the cool little sister or the girl you had a crush on but knew you didn't have a chance of dating. Later on, after she came out, many of her old male friends in the hip-hop world told her they knew about her all along.

"But they were like, you're still Lynne," she recalled. "We love you. You're mad cool. I knew, but I still had a crush on you."

After receiving a degree in journalism at SUNY New Paltz, Johnson did a lot of freelance writing as a cultural critic of hip-hop and black feminism, penning essays and reviews for publications such as New York Press, ColorLines, Paper and even the Wall Street Journal.

It was the mid-1990s, and the web was about to explode. Those early years were exciting for black techies. Digital spaces sprouted like weeds, and Johnson seemed to be involved in almost all of the most popular ones, from the pioneering internet community New York Online to the offline outposts of the tech world like the Brooklyn cybercafé Kokobar.

Johnson was an editor at the now-defunct Digital New York magazine and working in the trenches of blackplanet.com as a writer and editor, which by the late '90s was the top website aimed at creating community among African Americans. During those years, Johnson began to hone her knowledge as an online social networking expert. She took those skills with her when she was hired to be the online editor for Vibe magazine's website in June 2002.

And that's when her star began to rise in the intertwining worlds of the World Wide Web and music. At Vibe, she was not afraid to step out on a limb, and she often took a lot of heat while testing out tools and applications with the aim of creating online community. One of her projects, tying user-submitted comments to the magazine's online articles, was met with derision by those above and below her on the masthead. Nowadays, that wouldn't raise an eyebrow, but back then, it was still a new idea.

"Some people hated it," she said. "Some of them worked for me." But she was undaunted: "I thought it was a great idea."

She introduced mobile text message voting back in the late 1990s, a feature that fans of American Idol probably take for granted, for Vibe's extremely popular televised awards show. Her risks in the uncharted territories of social networking — before MySpace.com and Facebook.com — garnered her respect among her former peers at Vibe.com, who only realized her vision after she left.

"The ad sales guy said he misses me because I got it," she said. "We were the profit center of the company at the time," she explained, referring to the Vibe/Spin ventures. "The magazine was flat, but [online] ad sales were growing."