“At the heart of the debate is the absence of a clear black policy agenda for the post-civil rights era,” says Omar Wasow, co-founder of BlackPlanet.com and a Ph.D candidate in African American Studies at Harvard University. “And, whether President Obama wins or loses in 2012, that debate is unlikely to be resolved any time soon.”

Omar Wasow’s TV Highlights from Omar Wasow on Vimeo.

Sixdegrees, as the name implies, is a site built around the idea that everyone in the world can be connected to everyone else by no more than six intermediate friends, relatives and acquaintances. Though sites riffing off of the same concept have been on the Net for years, “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” and the variations thereof were never serious attempts to map the human interconnections of the world. Sixdegrees, on the other hand, set out to build a human genome project for the business card set.