Jeff Beckham

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’ve been neglecting posting here while I’ve been spending time posting over at Austinist, writing a couple of sports-related items per week. Along the way, I’ve discovered a hidden gem among Austin sports sites: Barking Carnival. Writing under pseudonyms like “ChrisApplewhite”, “EyesOfTX”, and “HenryJames”, the Barking Carnival crew has been putting out some of the [...]

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The Austin Chronicle rolled out its list of winners in its annual Best of Austin awards today. Congratulations to Eileen Smith of In the Pink Texas and Texas Monthly for a dual win in the Readers’ Poll, pulling down honors as Best Blogger and for ITPT as best Local Political Blog.
Also congrats to Allen Chen [...]

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The AP looks at how newspapers are using widgets — small, stand-alone programs people can place on their own web pages or desktops — to “draw in new readers and to boost their brands throughout the Internet.”
In a way, it’s an extension of news feeds and another example that a person doesn’t have to come [...]

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Much has been written already about the New York Times’ decision to end their TimesSelect subscription service. Check out some of the best here:

Jeff Jarvis
Staci Kramer
Rex Hammock
Dan Gillmor

As those folks point out, there’s more there than just freeing the Times columnists from behind a paywall. The Times is also opening up their archives for the [...]

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I’m an unabashed fan of Rob Curley. He recently posted a transcript from his interview with Northwestern’s Media Management Center for a report called “Running While the Earth Shakes: Creating an Innovation Strategy to Win in the Digital Age.”
Curley cuts to the chase in defining why newspapers have trouble in their approach to the web:
“So [...]

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No local publications were included among the finalists for the 2007 Online Journalism Awards.
The Houston Chronicle’s Science Guy was among the nominees in the Beat Reporting (Large) category.
Where last year’s awards were heavily populated with coverage of Hurricane Katrina, this year’s list includes several publications’ coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings.
The winners will be announced [...]

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A couple of weeks ago, the Bivings Report published an analysis of US consumer magazines and the way they use the web. They looked at the top 50 commercial magazines (according to circulation).
Among their key findings:

More magazines are using reporter blogs in 2007 than in 2006. Fifty-eight percent of the magazines researched now [...]

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Texas Monthly Editor Evan Smith announced today on his blog that he’s hired Eileen Smith (no relation) as the first editor of the magazine’s website, TexasMonthly.com.
Eileen has run the In the Pink Texas site and been a senior editor at Pluck.
This should be an excellent hire for the magazine. I met Eileen briefly during a [...]

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The folks over at the Bivings Report have ranked the Austin American-Statesman’s website among their Top 10 Best Newspaper Websites in the United States.
Statesman.com came in at No. 8. The rankings said:
We really like the unique layout and coloring of this site’s homepage. We’re also giving this site points for allowing anyone to blog and [...]

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