The Jeff Beckham Weblog

I’m beginning 2008 by catching up on a few things from 2007, and I’m glad for it. Today, I began implementing some of Steve Rubel’s suggestions to Turn Gmail Into Your Personal Nerve Center. The IMified program added to Google’s chat feature turns out to be impressively powerful. It’s funny to think that Steve wrote [...]

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UPDATE (Dec. 20): The photo I took was included in the latest edition of the Schmap New York Guide.
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I got a note this week that one of the photos I took during our recent trip to New York was “short-listed” to be included in the Schmap New York Guide.
Schmap publishes digital travel guides for destinations [...]

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The New York Times has a terrific story today about the long-running feud between heart surgeons Denton Cooley and Michael DeBakey, which started in 1969 when Cooley took an artificial heart from the DeBakey’s lab and implanted it in a patient. Now Cooley, 87, and DeBakey, 99, have made up.
Interestingly, Dr. Cooley played basketball at [...]

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For the past seven years, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey posted more than a thousand entries under the pseudonym “rahodeb” on a Yahoo Finance bulletin board, praising his own company and bashing competitors like Wild Oats.
Those postings came to light this week as part of the FTC lawsuit to block Whole Foods’ takeover of Wild [...]

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The organizers of Maker Faire have chosen Austin as the first stop outside of the San Francisco Bay Area for their collection of do-it-yourself science, art, craft, and engineering projects.
Maker Faire is put on by the staff of Make and Craft magazines, which aim to inspire people to dig deep into DIY projects and to [...]

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Plan Capitol Metro Trip Via Cell Phone: The Austin Chronicle’s Lee Nichols has great success at first, then a few stumbles, when using a text-messaging feature through the Capitol Metro web site to plan the fastest bus routes around town. Cap Metro is partnering with Dadnab to provide this feature.
Austin Called a Great Beer Town: [...]

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The change in commenting policy wasn’t the only news coming out of TexasMonthly.com yesterday. The magazine debuted a new design and several new online features.
Not surprisingly, the design looks terrific. There are some spiffy additions right up front, starting with video Table of Contents, a narrated slideshow, and video tour of the state capitol from [...]

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Two Austin publications were honored at the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Awards last week. The Austin Chronicle won third place in the Ad Design category, while the Chronicle’s Kevin Brass won third in the Media Reporting/Criticism category for his Media Watch columns. The Chronicle’s online group won second place in the Website Content Feature category [...]

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Kudos to Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League for his recent talk to Bootstrap Austin, a group of local startup entrepreneurs. Tim shared how he and his wife, Karrie, ran all the facets of the Drafthouse in the early days of the business before finding great success.
In conjunction with League’s speech, the Bootstrap Austin group kicked [...]

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Texas Monthly won 11 awards at the 22nd Annual National City and Regional Magazine Awards competition last week, including including top honorsvin excellence in writing, excellence in design, cover and special issues.
The magazine came in just behind Los Angeles magazine in number of overall awards, and the LA mag also won gold in general excellence [...]

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