During an interview with WRUG Radio, which we found through MissJia, Frankie Lons, always on ten with her sayings (“man down,” “man up,” “hangin’ around like wallpaper,” “and the plot thickens”) was asked about her daughter’s recent comments about Michelle from Destiny’s Child, and the response Kelly Rowland had to that drama. In true Frankie fashion, she kept it really real, and blamed Keyshia’s comments on boredom, but that she really has nothing but love for DC. Some of it didn’t make sense, but you get what she’s trying to say:

“Keyshia…sometimes she get bored. She didn’t mean no harm. Actually it was a compliment because Michelle did keep up.”

“Shout out to Michelle, Beyoncé, and what’s the other one’s name? Deez Nuts. I’m just playing! Shout out to Destiny’s Child, ya’ll did a wonderful job. And Keyshia didn’t mean no harm so ya’ll just gotta give her the benefit of the doubt. She’s married, sometimes she gets bored. But she has her Kodak moments. When she say something negative, that means it’s actually positive.”

Side eye at the negative means positive…but let’s continue:

“My baby loves all the celebrities. She loves everybody. Sometimes she has a bad way of showing it, a funny way of showing it. But when she focus on you, that means she loves you and she’s complimenting you. And I wanna be like Keyshia when I grow up…She didn’t mean no harm. She loved it…she make you work, she ain’t gonna just give you no compliment. You gotta work for it.”

I guess…but there are better things to do when you’re bored. But like Frankie said, it’s time to lay off Keyshia, especially since she’s cleaned up her act on Twitter. Now if we could just get her to stop snapping off on her fans in concert she might be all right…

Check out the video and start around the 1:20 mark. Let us know what you think! 

Credit: AP Image

From EurWeb

Yikes, Sloane Stephens and Serena Williams have beef.

After the rising tennis star totally upset her ‘mentor’ in the Australian Open quarterfinals, it turns out Serena hasn’t spoken to the young athlete.

“She’s not said one word to me, not spoken to me, not said hi, not looked my way, not been in the same room with me since I played her in Australia,” Stephens said in an interview with ESPN the Magazine that was conducted prior to the U.S. Fed Cup win over Sweden last month, when both were on the team. “And that should tell everyone something, how she went from saying all these nice things about me to unfollowing me on Twitter.”

Read more at EurWeb.com.

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The Root has made a major digital move. The Afrocentric news website has just launched “The Chatterati,”  a digital tool sponsored by Toyota Avalon, that presents up-to-the-minute information about the themes trending among Twitter’s black audience. Scroll down on the right side of the homepage to check it out.

This is significant because African Americans are a community that indexes higher than other groups in terms of digital connectivity. According to a recent Pew Research Center study of social media users, 26 percent of black people on the Internet who were surveyed said they used Twitter. This is compared to 14 percent of white users and 19 percent of Hispanics.

“The Root’s ambition has always been to shine a spotlight on the wide variety of views that African Americans bring to any subject,” said Donna Byrd, publisher of The Root, in a press statement. “The Chatterati fits right in with that mission, putting into clear focus what the black community is paying attention to on this critical social media platform.”

According to the Root, The Chatterati will cull the top hashtags, top stories, top retweets and the most favorite tweets among the black community on Twitter. Even further, the Root will showcase social news stories within The Chatterati, as well as highlight staff picks of Twitter’s best photos, most inspiring and funny tweets, and more, all being shared by black Twitter users.

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According to a statistical study from Georgia Tech, you don’t have to be as famous as Warren Buffett, who gained almost 100,000 followers on Twitter in just over an hour, to lure in large numbers of Twitter followers. The key, the study found is sharing information. And not the kind of information like what you’re having for lunch. But rather details about news, social issues, and politics; in other words, things of significance for the public at large.

Where it does help to show a little “self expression,” to use the language of the study, is having an opinion about what you’re tweeting.

Also be positive. “Complaining or otherwise expressing negative sentiment inhibited follower growth, while expressing positive sentiment helped facilitate it,” reports SocialTimes.

“It matters what you say, and how you say it,” study authors Eric Gilbert and C.J. Hutto and Sarita Yardi wrote.

And cut down on the hashtags. The study found that overuse of hashtags turns off would-be followers.

For the study, researchers tracked 507 Twitter users and their follower counts for 15 months.

Source: WENN

21-year-old Azealia Banks is no stranger to Twitter beef. To be perfectly honest, there a lot of people who don’t know her for her actual occupation, which is a rapper/entertainer. Instead, many only know her for having diarrhea of the mouth and her infamous social media squabbles with other celebs. In 2013 alone, the Harlem emcee has made headlines for using her Twitter page to blast Rita Ora, deeming her as a “Rihanna understudy,” telling rapper A$AP Rocky that he needs to “come out of the closet” and  justifying her use of derogatory gay slurs. And that’s just in 2013, not even counting previous issues she’s had with T.I., Nicki Minaj, Lil Kim, Iggy Azealia, Jim Jones and a host of others. Basically she’s been doing the most and many have expressed concern that her sharp tongue could be irreversibly damaging her budding career.

It appears that the “212″ rapper’s management team may have shared similar concerns because according to The YBF,  Azealia has turned her Twitter account over to be managed by her label. While this is may be bad news for fans and Twitter users who follow the rapper just so that they can watch drama unfold, this is probably one of the best decisions that Azealia has made in awhile. We can’t say that it will do much for her short temper, but it will serve as somewhat of a barrier, keeping her from tweeting before she really takes time to think the damaging messages that she tweets out for her 344,865 followers to see.

There’s been no word on whether or not any of her other social media accounts have been turned over to Universal Music Group as well, but she appears to still be managing her own Instagram account.

What other celebs do you think should consider having their social media pages managed by their labels?

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Dearest Sisters,

Having read the timelines of a few male “relationship experts” I have laughed and sometimes just stared in disbelief. At first, I was livid with these men, these snake oil salesmen who jumped on the “Act Like A Lady, Think Like A Man” money train. I wanted to RUIN their little hustle. But when I stopped to consider the whole racket, when I looked at the amount of women following these men, retweeting their misogynistic drivel I realized my energies were focused in the wrong direction.

Ladies, I understand. You ignore your gut sometimes. You collect all the warnings & wisdom together into a neat pile and stack them at the back corner of your mind. You leave them there. You leave them there because if you dust them off and consider them, they will lead you further away from your goal. The goal that every Jared’s commercial throws at you. The goal your Auntie Janet reminds you of at every family reunion:

Securing a loving, long-lasting in relationship.

We all want to be loved, to feel worthy of someone’s affection, time, trust. A ring and a happily ever after. But then we get hurt in the pursuit of it all. Walls go up. Tears roll down. Anger makes a home. Trust runs away. Issues fester. And relationships become much more of an obscure maze than we ever thought possible.

Enter: The male self-professed “relationship expert” who, in all honesty, says some of the right things. He gives us the new age basics for relationships, doesn’t he? With tweets like “A relationship should be 100/100, not 50/50,” and “Communication is key.”

No untruths there, right? But we, as women, fail to realize that these are gems that are already buried in our feminine intuition. The gems we ignore because we’re tired of waiting for the right one. We want this one to be The One! We sidestep what was divinely placed in us and substitute it with the robotic, woman-hating and sometimes even rape culture reinforcing “advice” from men who show every sign of unresolved mommy issues. But because they’ve got 38,000 followers on Twitter, they MUST be preaching some kinda results-yielding truth, right? Not always.

We’ve succumb to a watered-down perception of what it means to be a woman. We take our place as sex objects and chefs for the men in our lives because that’s where we belong, right? That’s what it takes to get and keep a good man, right? Well yeah, to let some of these hireling male relationship “experts” tell it that’s exactly right.

We have been blinded to the height and depth of ourselves, the gifts and the inward “knowing” inherent to womanhood. We say that we believe we are intellectual equals to men yet we scurry to the bookshelves and Twitter to support men who believe it is their duty to teach women how to be women yet spend little to no time instructing MALES how to be MEN. We count their knowledge of us superior to our own intuition, our own lessons learned from our mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers. We deny our internal GPS when dealing with relationships because of our biological clocks wired by societal ideology to explode if we haven’t “locked him down” and started working on some babies before 30. I know. I’ve wrestled with it too.

We accept messages from men who are knowingly working with a pair of imbalanced scales – weighting women’s behavior within relationships more heavily than men’s. We willingly carry that weight if it’ll get us a man. We believe irresponsible generalizations about both sexes from men who in more than one way demonstrate that their main priority is to make a profit. We disregard what we have been conditioned to disregard. We devalue our higher selves that function as more than sexual excitement and visual aesthetic for men because well, society devalues us.

Am I discrediting male relationship advisers  Absolutely not. I have learned a great many lessons from men with regards to love and the pursuit of love. But their intentions were pure. Their messages were clean of any underlying agenda. Their messages were responsible. When they took on the mantle to help people with their love lives they took it seriously and understood that every word they wrote, every word they spoke would count. They understood that they have a responsibility to THINK OBJECTIVELY and to dispense advice as a result of that.

What I am offering is an invitation to women to turn the lights on. To not just run blindly in the direction of whatever book or tweet claims to help you get a man. Be self-aware. Be aware of the messages. Open your eyes to misogyny. Don’t internalize everything you read or hear. As Bishop T.D. Jakes one wrote, “Eat the meat and throw away the bones.”

Just because a man said it does not mean it is law. Just because a man discounts your mind, does not mean you are incapable of thought. We are more in tune with love and life than we even dare to consider. And if ever there were a time to gather up our womanhood and walk boldly in it, it is now.

Love,

A Sister Offering Something To Consider

La Truly’s writing is powered by a lifetime of anecdotal proof that awkward can transform to awesome and fear can cast its crown before courage. La seeks to encourage thought, discussion and change among young women through her writing. Follow her on Twitter: @AshleyLaTruly and AboutMe www.about.me/latruly