A former co-worker of mine, and all-around-good-guy, Rod Charles was one CBC Radio One’s flagship program This Morning, um, this morning. Unfortunately, I missed the segment (hoping to catch it tonight in repeat), but this here’s the promo blurb used on the show’s site:

Black History Website: Five Years ago, Rod Charles decided to quit complaining about the media’s portrayal of the Black community and do something about it. So he created blackvoice.com an internet website compiling Canadian black history, culture and ideas.

Though we worked together at CANOE, I first met Rod when he was starting out BlackVoice and I was working at The Convergence. Both sites, like saila.com, were/are hosted by ThinData where Rod now works and I sit on its Advisory Board.

ThinData is a unique success story: founded by Chris Carder and Chancellor Crawford in '95, it now has more than 200 corporate clients yet remains privately held and has a strong social conscious. (BTW, you can catch Chris on TSN’s Off the Record tonight as well.) It's a model that saved the company from imploded like many other dot-coms have this past year-and-a-half.