The Jeff Beckham Weblog

The Economist reports on the death of college yearbooks:
One fixture of college life is rapidly disappearing. Yearbooks, those beloved annual publications recording the events and people of the academic year, are suffering from plummeting print-runs, or are even being dropped altogether, in colleges across the country.
Predictably, the culprits are cost (as high as $75) and [...]

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Barack Obama made news last week by announcing he’s opting out of accepting public funds for his presidential campaign. Instead, he’ll continue to rely on individual donations.
XPLANE, a company that specializes in explaining complex information in a visual format, has come up with a terrific visualization to illustrate that concept, and show how Obama has [...]

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Nick Carr has a terrific article in this month’s Atlantic magazine titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?“. It’s an insightful look at how the Web is changing the way we think — moving away from deep concentration, understanding and analysis toward short, scannable, sharable bursts of information.

I don’t agree that Google and the Web are [...]

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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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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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The Statesman’s entertainment site, Austin360.com, won a Newspaper Association of America Digital Edge Award for Best Local Guide or Entertainment Site in its circulation category.
The Digital Edge Awards categories, part of the Media Innovation Awards, drew more than 200 entries from U.S. newspapers of all sizes. The volunteer team of judges, who are all [...]

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The recent launch of local journalism site EveryBlock tries to answer a question that doesn’t always have an easy response: “What’s happening in my neighborhood?”
Beginning with Chicago, New York City, and San Francisco, EveryBlock pulls together local news and public information, then allows you to narrow the focus to your particular neighborhood of interest. You [...]

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When it comes to the right way for local media to embrace the online world, I’ve been tempted for some time just to link to Rob Curley and add “What he said”.
My man just hit it out of the park again, this time with a piece in Harvard’s Nieman Reports that lays the the strategies [...]

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One of my favorite bloggers (and a darn nice person, to boot) is Chuck Kuffner. His Off the Kuff blog provides a steady stream of Houston news and commentary, as well as a look at statewide political races.
This month, Chuck was honored as one of Texas Monthly’s 35 People Who Will Shape Our Future. It’s [...]

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