Stories I “starred” in Google Reader over the past few days:
The Real McCoy: Texas quarterback Colt McCoy, back in his high school days, does a TV spot for a local pharmacy. (The Wizard of Odds)
Campus Papers are Well-read, and Advertisers are Noticing (from The Boston Globe via Rex Hammock)
Flock Ditches Shadows Bookmarking Service: Austin social [...]
The Austin American-Statesman and other Cox newspapers, along with 150 other papers nationwide, have partnered with Yahoo! in a deal designed to bring more advertising revenue to the papers and more content to Yahoo. The partnership begins in December with Yahoo’s HotJobs service.
There has been plenty of discussion since the news came out yesterday. Here [...]
Former NFL great Deion Sanders has a blog on Statesman.com. On the Line with Prime features updates every week or so from the man formerly known as “Prime Time”, who has ties with Austin now as the part-owner of the Austin Wranglers arena football team.
There’s good material there, too: this month has included a interview [...]
A hearty “what he said” to Scott Henson at Grits for Breakfast who points out that the website for the Texas Legislature now has RSS feeds that allow you to track bill texts and meeting times.
Tags: Digital
One of the panels I suggested for SXSW 2007 has been selected to be part of next spring’s event. It’s called “Designing for Convergent Devices”. My initial description went like this:
How do you provide a consistent user experience across various devices (web, TV, handhelds, cell phones) that reinforces the concept of convergent services? A panel [...]
Tags: Digital
Speaking of raising money, Austin-based vacation rental site HomeAway.com brought in $160 million in funding and bought its largest competitor, VRBO.com. The amount was the largest single private equity investment for an Austin company.
HomeAway lists more than 65,000 vacation rental homes, but the acquisition of VRBO.com should double that amount worldwide.
Related stories:
Austin company gets record [...]
Tags: General
Via paidContent.org and PEHub comes word that Austin-based publishing services company Pluck has pulled in an investment from Reuters.
Pluck builds social media solutions for publishers. The company has raised $7 million in a second round of funding, with Reuters joining Austin Ventures and Mayfield in investing in this round. Pluck now has raised around $17 [...]
To emphasize that they’re serious about blogging, Dell announced today their external blog policy that emphasizes transparency, accuracy, and ethics.
Dell has come a long way since beginning their corporate blog in July. They indicated in today’s announcement that Michael Dell and other executives are expected to beginning blogging.
Paul Walker of The Zone Read [...]
Tags: Digital
Two big stories around digital media and the future of newspapers have emerged in the past few days. There’s plenty of info about them out on the Web, but I wanted to provide a couple of pointers to get you started:
Gannett to Crowdsource News: The publisher of USA Today and 90 other daily newspapers is [...]
A new study of the skills and characteristics important to online newsrooms has been released by the Medill School of Journalism with the cooperation of the Online News Association. Surprisingly, the most important skills cited weren’t tech-related.
A few of the key findings, as pointed to by Rich Gordon in E-Media Tidbits:
The skills deemed most important [...]
