The Jeff Beckham Weblog

For sports fans, one of the can’t-miss sites on the Web is Deadspin. I’d say I get 90% of my information about national sports from there.
Today I’m honored to have a small piece I wrote appear there as part of the site’s NCAA Tournament preview. I took a look at the Texas A&M Aggies in [...]

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The New York Times is reporting that this week, Sports Illustrated will take the wise move of making its entire 53-year archive of stories and photos available for free online.
The new feature, called the Vault, will also contain video clips and all of its material will be searchable by athlete, coach, team, sport, decade and [...]

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At South by Southwest, the “Future of Corporate Blogs” panel talked about some issues companies have faced in launching blogs, and how they can be used to benefit the business.
The panelist whose story most closely matched with my employer’s was Lionel Menchaca of Dell, who created the Direct2Dell blog 18 months ago. That site now [...]

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Bryan Mason and Sarah Nelson of Adaptive Path addressed the challenges of getting the most out of talented people in their SXSW session titled “10 Tips for Managing a Creative Environment”.
Mason and Nelson studied theater troupes, orchestras, a restaurant kitchen, a magazine and a screenwriting collective to find out how these creative groups work well [...]

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One of the most interesting panels in all of South by Southwest Interactive was “Going Social Now“, Shiv Singh’s look at social influence marketing.
Singh, who works in the New York office of Avenue A/Razorfish, points out that today’s online shopping experience is not a linear process. We need to take advantage of the social influence [...]

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For the second straight year, Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh put on an inspiring performance at South by Southwest. Zappos, an online retailer that sells mostly shoes, but also is branching out into clothing and accessories, has built its reputation and business on providing amazing customer service.
This year’s edition, titled “Top 10 Lessons Learned in E-Commerce” [...]

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On Sunday, I hosted a discussion at SXSW Interactive titled “How Accessible Should Your Site Be?“. The format was different from the traditional PowerPoint slides and panelist presentation. This session was structured to encourage discussion and interactivity. It was held in a big ballroom, with five other discussions on accessibility and web standards happening simultaneously [...]

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Humans are social animals. And in “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations“, Clay Shirky shows how the widespread adoption of the internet has allowed us to become more social than ever.
And though the focus is on the online tools we use to find, meet, and talk with each other, you don’t need [...]

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I just posted a story about BarCamp Austin III over on Austinist.
BarCamp is more accurately called an “unconference”: Every part of the gathering, from the schedule to the content to the communications, is worked out by the participants. Rather than passively receiving information like at traditional conferences, people at BarCamp are asked to actively participate, [...]

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