The hardworking dads fighting to "take back paternity" now have some hardware to help them in their quest. DadLabs can now put (fasten securely) their IAWTV award on the coveted mantle space. The International Academy of Web Television Awards presented the Austin-based show with their Best Educational Series award (a bronze-casted series of tubes), the very first IAWTA award given by the newly formed academy. DadLabs formed in 2004 when a group of filmmakers who happened to be fathers (or is that the other way around) decided to take their parenting experience to the Internet in an attempt "to be the voice of the new fatherhood," through a plethora (800+ to date) of funny and short instructional videos on everything from baby gadgets to swear alternatives. more ›

You might remember Austinite Joseph Nicolosi's work from earlier this year, when his Mario Brothers feature film bumper was shown during SXSW. We instantly fell in love with his videos, and we're happy to report that he's recently completed a new one called "Kittywood Studios: Cat Videos Incorporated." The premise is that there is just one super-huge company responsible for every single cat video on the web. We're pretty sure we had this idea one night hanging out with some Sociology majors behind Spiderhouse, but we're glad someone made it a reality. Enjoy, and follow Joe on Twitter @tehpwnshop. more ›

This week, the popular crowd-sourced review site Yelp! began including "hipster" as a type of ambience you might experience at venues, bars, and restaurants around town. We did a quick search to see which sites in Austin lived up to that mysterious type of atmosphere. more ›

Upon arriving at the venerable Austin Convention Center on a blustery Friday afternoon, the first thing all the SXSW Interactive participants encountered, before even entering the building, was an onslaught of advertising for all kinds of companies - mobile apps, websites, media and on and on. After standing in 2 separate lines (one for badge and one for bag swag), the time arrived for panels. First up: Programming and Minimalism, presented by Jon Dahl from Zencoder. By describing programming as "defining complex precesses in a precise way", Dahl went on to draw parallels to craftsmen. more ›

Even though we've heard through at least one outlet that chillwave, that sparkly, tape-garbled, late-2000s form of noise-singed ambient pop, is dead, that's usually when the "dead" genre in question starts to get pretty interesting. (See: New York rap in the mid-1990s.) more ›

• Kingston street battle continues; residents trapped inside homes.
• North Korea scraps naval agreement with South.
• BP used riskier method to seal oil well before blast.

Less than a year after moving to Austin from Ohio, popular internet radio station WOXY.com has closed. The station went silent around 9 am today, and a note on the station's website read: "Due to current economic realities and the lack of ongoing funding for WOXY's operations, we've been forced to suspend our live broadcasts as of March 23rd. We're continuing to explore options to keep The Future of Rock and Roll alive." more ›

City officials are preparing their official response to Google to illustrate why Austin is the best place for the high-speed service. Now there's a website - BigGigAustin.org - that gives the community a chance to chime in as well. more ›

Like every other newspaper trying to stay solvent in the face of declining advertising sales, the Austin American-Statesman is actively thinking outside the proverbial box, today quietly unveiling its latest revenue stream: Twitter ads. more ›

The Wall Street Journal reports that engineers at Dell are developing a mobile device that would access the Web, but doesn't work as a phone. more ›

Many folks on Twitter are reporting that Gmail and assorted Google services are currently down for them. We're pulling up ours ok, but an informal survey shows that many around downtown (@bnl771), on UT campus (@anorwood), or just around town (@mavsmom) are experiencing errors. The problem seems to be hit or miss, as @recoveringlazy and @mavsmom aren't seeing any issues. In other internet news, there's a Woot-Off going on right now. more ›

After much resistance from the four cities where the download cap trials were to take place, Time Warner and NY Sen. Chuck Schumer announced today that the planned trials are off -- for now. more ›

Something to start planning for: Time Warner Cable is going to set up tiered pricing for internet subscribers in Austin and San Antonio very soon. A Time Warner spokesman told the Statesman's Omar Gallaga that this new pricing plan will go into effect this summer. This means that if you watch a lot of streaming video or download a lot of music, your cable bill is going to increase. If you don't, perhaps your bill will remain the same as it is, but you will be charged extra if your data usage goes over your set limit. The only good news here may be for Grande, who will likely get some new business from this. [Digital Savant] more ›

Neil Young sang that "the same thing that makes you live can kill you in the end." It’s a sentiment I return to again and again—most often when reflecting on failed romances, but also regarding stuff like work. Lately, Neil’s quote has been cropping up when I try to wrap my pretty little very popular head around the concept of the big, bad, beautiful, beastly thing we call the Internet, which has brought so many good things but also led to all sorts of fucked-up-edness. more ›

The deadline for submissions is midnight on January 9. [Texas Social Media Awards] more ›

Austin the most "digitally-savvy" city in the nation? At least 12% of residents buy purchases off the internet. Fire at Northwest Austin home leaves a woman critically injured. Someone drove a Jeep into a house off of E. 12th near Pleasant Valley last night. Allstate Insurance will pay its Texas customers $71 million in refunds, credits and rate reductions for homeowner policies after a settlement with the state. more ›

Unicorn’s site will be an ad-supported entertainment site offering “free, unlimited access” to audio and video content, but there’s more to it: Rather than focusing on sheer volume of music, as MySpace seems to intend, it looks like Unicorn will raise the bar by focusing on two primary goals: (1) Offering consistent, high-definition content to customers, and (2) allowing emerging artists to showcase their work in a more attractive, efficient and profitable way. more ›

Now in its sixth week, the Writers Guild of America strike is still going strong. And despite Alec Baldwin's hilarious/bizarre advice and Michael Eisner's name-calling, WGA members show few signs of giving in any time soon. Though the effects of the strike are most evident in places like Los Angeles and New York City, you may be surprised to learn that there are around 100 WGA members living here in Austin. more ›

City Council Member Lee Leffingwell and the City of Austin seek resident and visitor input alike for a major City of Austin website redesign via the Austin Go survey. Up until January 4th, you can tell the gub'ment just how you'd like their new-fangled webhighwaytubes to assist you by filling out the online survey on such topics as how you use the City of Austin site, how you'd like to see it improved, and how you rate redesign areas such as navigation, timeliness and accuracy of the online information the city provides, and security of personal information. more ›

This is a good example of poor judgment.The students of Penn State University should have taken a note from their counterparts at Tarleton State University when picking out this year's Halloween costumes. Even more idiotic than their costume idea was their decision to post the resulting pictures on Facebook. Photos of two Penn State students donning Virginia Tech t-shirts, covered with bullet holes and fake blood, were put up on Facebook and quickly spread over... more ›

It’s list-making season – for children who believe in Santa, music writers, etc – and there are three rap albums that you are bound to see wherever it is that you see lists: Jay-Z’s American Gangster, Kanye West’s Graduate, and Lil’ Wayne’s Da Drought 3. These artists all create good music and lots of people purchased and enjoyed all three of these works. Lil’ Wayne, in particular, may have produced the two most gifted hours... more ›

Between now and January, New Release Tuesday will focus on 2007 reflections and music news related to both this year's releases and 2008's potential. The standard NRT posts will resume in 2008. As 2007 winds down, most of the Internet begins to consider their favorite releases of the last twelve months. Austinist is no different: our top albums of 2007 (a collective list based on all the writers' top picks) is in the works.... more ›

*The views expressed in Truesday are those of the author and do not represent Austinist as a whole. Thank heavens.* -The Editors Every city goes through its own little evolution. Not always pretty, not always clean, but always in the process of becoming. Our little oasis is no different. There is a change upon us, and it is high time we grabbed the wheel and started to do some stunt steerin’. You know, to... more ›

You wouldn’t necessarily think the squeaky-clean world of power-pop and dirty, dirty metal have a great deal in common, but they do share a few similarities other than loud guitars. Writers and fans of metal often rate metal in terms of its “heaviness,” as if how sludgy, powerful, hard, or just “metal” an artist is works as a sure-fire way to judge their output. Even when picking and choosing between different types of metal, the... more ›

Frank Warren appears to be a typical, soft-spoken family man from Maryland. But on the internet, Warren, like a priest, accepts confessions. Hundreds of anonymous, artistically-rendered secrets are sent to him on postcards every day. He reads each one, carefully selecting and displaying a handful of them on his blog, PostSecret, every Sunday. What was originally intended as a one-off art project has grown into not only a website boasting over a million hits a... more ›

Austinites are at the forefront of the blogging community, according to a new report published by a leading market research firm. Scarborough Research's new survey found that Austin tops other tech-heavy cities—Portland, San Francisco and Seattle rounded out the top four—when it comes to folks who either read or contribute to a blog. Fully fifteen percent of adults in Austin interact with blogs in some fashion; the research firm attributes this to both the tech... more ›

Contrary to popular opinion, feminism and romance are not incompatible and feminism may actually improve the quality of heterosexual relationships. The Statesman reports that the ACLU and LULAC have complained about the location of the new municipal court. US House of Representatives has voted overwhelmingly to renew the ban on taxing Internet access — but only for 4 years, not permanently. MySpace will offer members of its popular social network free Internet phone calls... more ›

First things first: we must differentiate between the chutzpah of a band at Radiohead's level of critical distinction and popularity initially releasing their album for donation and making the most revolutionary music industry statement since the dawn of the Internet Age... (big breath) ...and the chutzpah it takes to make truly ground-breaking musical statements. In Rainbows does not employ the latter. Still, one leaves with the impression that the boys from Oxford are convinced that,... more ›

Admit it: sometimes you have those random Tuesday nights when you might be perfectly happy knocking back a few rounds with Mister 6'3" 18-to-89-year-old White/Asian/Hispanic Full-Figured Agnostic Non-Smoker. With a high school diploma.One of the internet's biggest dating sites is taking its free matchmaking services somewhere you wouldn't expect: offline. The creators of OkCupid, which published those surprising survey results about Austin singles back in August, today unveiled a new website called CrazyBlindDate.com. The idea's... more ›

What, exactly, is postmodernism? We ask ourselves this question whenever the work of a postmodern playwright makes the stage in Austin. Charles L. Mee is one such playwright. Did you know that he encourages writers to "pillage [my] plays as I have pillaged the structures and contents of the plays of Euripides and Brecht and stuff out of Soap Opera Digest and the evening news and the internet, and build your own, entirely new, piece..."?... more ›