Every year, like clockwork, you’ll find me glued to a TV set at a sports bar, friends house, or restaurant. I’ll sit there 4 quarters, watching a certain NBA team show 3 western conference teams how it’s done, then an eastern conference team in the finals. It is a wonderful experience being a Spurs fan.

Since I only watch 25-35 hours of live TV a year, it is awfully hard for me justify the $80 or $90 a month for cable. There’s a few sitcoms I watch, but they are available on great services like Hulu. So where does that leave me? Listening to the game on the radio, errr, internet radio.

I would have no problem paying $5 per game to watch them in my browser - just like Hulu. I’d even be fine with watching the two and three minute commercial breaks because it’s not like they can cut them out if I’m watching it live.

So, they would be able to get $5 from me per game, and the ability to show me 40-50 commercials. You can’t tell me that this is not a money making opportunity. I’m sure the cable companies have some pressure on the NBA and TNT/ESPN/ABC to keep them exclusive to the old RG6, but how long can that last?

I feel like the NBA, as well as myself, is missing out on a golden opportunity to, in their case, make a bunch of money and, in my case, watch Tony Parker drive the lane for an easy 2.

We all try to keep the signal to noise ration down quite a bit when communicating. Unfortunately, I think most of us are usually on the receiving end of it. I have tried to keep tabs on my communicating by asking myself the questions: Is this the right outlet? Is this the right context?

Normally I will send out a tweet with just a little bit of information rather than whip out Wordpress and goto town writing a blog post because what I have to say doesn’t need to be elaborated on.

I do not have a blog of my own. I have a tumble log, but that’s nothing more than an aggregate of what I publish. So I publish in different blogs that have to do with the topic I’m writing about - be it politics, culture, or technology (here).

So after being unsatisfied with our current Twitter/Blog/RSS scheme, I came up with an interesting idea to weave our tweets into the flow for Downtown Cartel as asides. Matt Mullenweg, creator of Wordpress, introduced asides to the blogging community a couple of years ago. I found that asides were exactly the thing that microblogging platforms like Twitter and Pownce tried to be but were handled differently - mainly by method of distribution.

I’m still trying to figure out how to pull off asides so that they work with Twitter, Wordpress and Twitter-Tool. I’m not certain that this can be done, but we’ll see.

Cody Marx Bailey, a partner in Downtown Cartel, was recently interviewed by our friend Lynn Bender of GeekAustin.org. As an integral part of the scene in Bryan/College Station, he has brought a lot of attention to what was traditionally a low-tech culture.

The Downtown Cartel crew try to make it over to Austin several times a month to attend different events, functions, and networking opportunities so keep an eye for us if you see us out and about.

Somehow I missed the fact that an interview I did while at the BIL Conference in March was posted to YouTube. For those of you who don’t know what BIL is, it’s an unconference that was held outside of the TED Conference in Monterey, California. Several members from the Creative Space helped plan the event and made the trek out to California.

Downtown Bryan, TX recently stepped it up a notch when our good friends over at Square One Bistro began announcing the lunch special and soup of the day over twitter. Yes, every day around 11:15, I get a little update with what’s being served for lunch.

I think this is a great way for non-tech businesses to have somewhat persistent contact with their users, err, patrons. I’m sure plenty of restaurants have an RSS feed of different things like events and specials - it’s time they move them to Twitter.

The Creative Space, the coworking space we operate out of, held BarCampTexas a few months ago. Travis Ward wore the shirt today and I sorta got to thinking about the process that unfolded as we planned our first BarCamp. I thought I’d post a few tips to sorta help those out there that might be planning a BarCamp for the first time.

1. Distribute the workload - Plain and simple, don’t do everything yourself. Let folks take on tasks and let them have ultimate responsibility. I think the understanding of “this is a group thing” will make people realize that they will be letting everyone down if they don’t get it done.
2. Promote, promote, promote - Living in Bryan/College Station, we knew we had to get out and really get the word out around the state. This meant taking a few trips to Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and talking with community leaders in those cities to ensure they energized the locals.
3. Get sponsors early - Before you choose a date, make sure you have a plan of attack ready for gathering sponsorship money. BarCamps can be done on a shoe-string budget, but if you have certain things in mind and a level of quality that may take some donated funds. Make sure you know the fiscal realities before you commit to a date.
4. Nice quality shirts - Spend the extra $250 for American Apparel. There’s nothing like a good shirt you’ll wear over and over again rather than a low-quality shirt you’ll just throw in a drawer and forget about. AA usually costs about $1-2 more than your average Hanes, but you’ll get so many more wears.
5. Access to alcohol - While not everyone drinks, make sure that there is at least access to alcohol towards the end of the night. Visitors will become more social and things will end on a good note. Besides, who doesn’t like a party?

If you have any other tips, just tweet them out using the hashtag #barcamptips. Or leave them in the comments section below. Thanks.