The Jeff Beckham Weblog

I posted an item today over at Austinist about the city hosting a series of town hall meetings to hear what folks in the community would like to see as part of the new City of Austin website. City officials have already done a web survey, and they plan to share the results of those [...]

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Over on the Austin Chronicle’s sports blog, Mark Fagan passes along the welcome news that the NBA Development League has announced that they will be streaming video of every league game for the remainder of the season. According to league president Dan Reed, this is the first time any professional sports league has enabled free [...]

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From the excellent Larry Brown Sports. Mack Brown looks a little disheveled, but maybe that’s a post-game look.

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Rafat Ali of paidContent is reporting that Austin social media company Pluck is up for sale for a target price of around $75 million.
Pluck has powered social media and blog syndication technology for top newspaper firms, including the Austin American-Statesman, and was a major driver behind last year’s redesign of the USA Today site.
PaidContent [...]

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Robosaurus, the 40-foot, 31-ton car-crunching robotic dinosaur, is hitting the auction block as part of the 37th annual Barrett-Jackson auction in Scottsdale, Arizona, beginning Jan. 12.
Robosaurus brought his fire-breathing charms to Austin this summer for the Alamo Drafthouse’s premiere of Transformers. Their site has some video from that tremendous event. I still have Robo’s photo [...]

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“Just think high - H I - to the sky, you and I, right now.”
Matthew McConaughey joins Jay-Z, Jon Stewart, Barack Obama and others in this video from the Consumer Electronics show imagining what Bill Gates’ last day at Microsoft might be like.

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Via Michael Corcoran in the Statesman’s Austin Music Source blog comes the very exciting news that The Reivers, my favorite Austin band of all time, is reuniting on Feb. 9 at The Parish.
Back in the mid-1980s, they were known as Zeitgeist, but had to change their name after a New Age band laid claim to [...]

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I snapped a camera-phone picture of this sign today at Austin’s Buffet Palace restaurant:
Please try to touch “No Touch” Sensor Without…”
Touching?

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The accidental innovator: The Economist profiles Evan Williams, the founder of both Blogger and Twitter. (The Economist)
Riddell starts shipping concussion-monitoring football helmets: Each helmet stores data about the last 100 impacts, which can later be wirelessly transmitted to a laptop for analysis. The University of Missouri and several other NCAA schools have already placed orders. [...]

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I got word a couple of weeks ago that one of my panel suggestions was accepted for the 2008 South by Southwest Interactive Festival.
The session, “How Accessible Should Your Site Be?”, won’t be in a panel format, however, but will instead be a part of the new Core Conversations program at the event. Here’s how [...]

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