Zeigen

“Web 2.0,” if it means anything at all, is a term usually used to reflect the modern trend of interactive web sites that encourage users to create and share content. Blogs, wikis such as Wikipedia, forums, social networks, podcasts, comment streams, RSS feeds — all these approaches and technologies form the backbone of the web 2.0 universe. (The term also reflects the second decade of the web’s existence, and the transition of web users from dialup speeds to broadband speeds.)

Web 2.0 today is in a state similar to the state of the web in 1998. Back then, four years into its rapid growth period, the “World Wide Web” (as we still called it then) had proven itself to be much more than a passing fad, and the vast majority of major organizations had created a presence. URLs had become a common sight on billboards. While mainstream and popular, there were still many people who had not really used the web extensively.

Today, almost everyone has heard of blogs, and most have used one or more of the vanguard web 2.0 sites such as Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter, etc. But even the most popular of these sites sign up only a small fraction of their visitors as users.

The central dilemma I see as a barrier to future growth is an adoption paradox: Coming up with incentives for users to create accounts and to start generating the content that in turn attracts more users to sign up. Peer pressure is an effective motivator, but many potential users don’t sign up because they don’t get what their role is, what the site is about, or how it would benefit them. In the meantime, they either avoid the site or lurk there.

(The lurker phenomenon is prevalent: A popular Flickr photo will have tens of thousands of views, but very few comments or links. A popular Twitter user’s page might be read by 100 times more people than actually sign up to follow that person. YouTube has hundreds of millions of viewers, millions of registered users, but less than a million users who have uploaded a video. For zeigen.com, according to my server logs, more than 5,000 unique visitors came to this site last month, and an unknown number more viewed the content via an RSS reader — but only 20 unique users left a comment.)

A user’s role at a web 2.0 site falls along a continuum between what I’ll call “public” versus “personal” personas.

Let’s take Flickr as an example. When you sign up for Flickr and begin publishing photographs, you’ll be doing one of these things:

• Publishing artful or beautiful or technically proficient photographs intended to be appreciated by a general audience
• Publishing photographs of a particular subject matter (such as, say, model airplanes) intended to be appreciated by fans of that subject matter (such as model airplane enthusiasts)
• Publishing photos of your friends and family, intended to be appreciated by people who know you
• Some combination of the above

YouTube follows the same pattern: Many users are uploading family videos, others are uploading things they find generally amusing or interesting, or a series of videos on a particular topics, or anywhere in between.

Similarly, blogs can be personal and intended for friends/family (journal sites), or public but general (such as a celebrity’s blog), or public and focused on a particular topic.

With some sites, such as Digg, the expectation is that there is no “personal” content — everything is for public consumption. You’d never promote stories about your family, only stories of interest to just about everyone.

Other sites, such as Facebook, are the opposite: Other than corporate or celebrity profiles, everything a user puts there is personal, about you, so almost no Facebook profiles are for artistic purposes. It’s all about your personal life.

Some Twitter users highlight the personal even to point of banality (”Ate lunch at sandwich place again. Had Turkey. Was good.”) while others spread breaking news, one-liners, observations, or punditry in an effort to attract more followers and support their public persona as a blogger or artist.

I’ve written about FriendFeed previously. and it continues to be the web 2.0 site I’m most interested in. The dilemma for me (and therefore I presume for most users) is where to draw the line.

For example: A friend posts a picture of their new haircut or has a status of “sad.” Because it’s a friend of mine, I want to compliment the haircut or ask them why they’re sad. Sometimes I just want to post what I had for lunch.

BUT — I have a few different types of followers on FriendFeed (co-workers, friends, business acquaintances, online contacts, random strangers). The people who subscribe to me who don’t know the person involved won’t want to follow that conversation. Sure, it’s fairly easy for them to skip it, but if my goal is to acquire more followers, I need to do so by keeping my persona public. So part of me becomes reluctant to post “personal” comments or links on FriendFeed, because the role I’ve so far taken on there is more public than personal. (I’m usually interested in starting conversations with a wide variety of interesting people about topics that I care about, and the items I share there are generally not about me.)

One prolific FriendFeed user, the notorious Robet Scoble, discussed creating a second account that’s more private, just for personal items — but that’s far from an ideal solution. Fragmenting yourself into different accounts is difficult to manage (especially when you start getting into the weeds of managing duplicate feeds, remembering to unsubscribe or subscribe to different people and join certain rooms on both of your accounts), and the UI of the site presumes that you only have a single account.

Yesterday FriendFeed launched a beta test of their new interface, and it’s a great improvement. In addition to improved aesthetics, there are a plethora of new features. The most important is the ability to categorize the people you follow into whatever labels you assign (Personal, Coworkers, Interesting, Noisy — whatever). Two of the default labels are “Personal” and “Professional,” which supports the observation I’m trying to make here.

However, I think FriendFeed has it almost backwards: It’s not so much that I want to categorize my friends based on how I know them (although I do want that) — much more, I want to categorize what I publish. Let me label the things I share as “Personal” or “Public” (and use even more tags if I want to assign them). That way the people who subscribe to me can decide if they want the full feed (complete with my lunch plans and haircut comments) or to automatically excise those parts they won’t care about.

For all web 2.0 sites, the first job is to clearly explain what the site is about, show how it benefits the prospective user, and ease new users up the learning curve. Once that’s done, helping users understand and manage their role along the public/personal continuum is essential to making the site sticky and successful. Tagging and categorization is the answer for that. Smart tools and good design will be needed to make this task intuitive and easy.

With Flickr, you can subscribe to a user’s entire photostream, or just to an individual series (as tagged by the user). The next step for many other web 2.0 sites, including Twitter, Facebook, and most of all FriendFeed, is to catch up to that concept.

(Here’s another Top 5 list from John T.! –Stephen)

With the Olympics sadly coming to a close, its time for the real games to begin! This week my focus turns sharply from Beijing, China to Denver, Colorado and the Democratic National Convention. So take off your sports fan hat and fasten on your citizen helmet! Lots of our channels will be covering the convention this week including: Barely Political, Epic Fu, and Veracifier. So don’t forget to supplement your network coverage with reports (and spoofs!) from the convention floor. That’s this week, but let’s takes a look back at my favorites from last week.

1. Scam School: Clever Match Scores Two Free Drinks. While sitting in a restaurant recently, a member of my party looked over the wine list and ended up ordering a “Conundrum,” which immediately sparked a fifteen minute discussion of the best riddles, puzzles, and tricks… We were amateurs compared to the crew at Scam School. It’s a weekly show that demonstrates the best in free drink-getting bar tricks. After watching the match trick in this week’s episode, I’m still not sure I could pull it off, but I’m eager for others to try.
2. Break.com: Best of Break 74. Speaking of bar tricks, this week’s Break.com included some guys attempting to take a flaming shot…which is listed in the dictionary under “terrible ideas” right next to “anything following the sentence, ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’” As with all Break.com videos, the best-laid plans lead to the most hilarious of consequences.
3. Internet Superstar: Daisy Whitney. Internet video hit a bit of a crossroads this past week, as Internet Superstar had New Media expert and critic Daisy Whitney in the shack. Daisy’s a writer for TV Week who’s got a show of her own called “The New Media Minute,” and she’s made no secret about being a huge fan of Internet Superstar (and of its host, Martin Sargent). It’s nice to see old media fawning over new media for once.
4. CNET: Back to School Gear. Although I don’t always include CNET in my Top 5, it’s easily one of my favorite shows each and every week. They’ve implemented a couple of changes (based on feedback from TiVo users) that are worth highlighting. Not only is Molly trying to talk about the prices of the products they’re reviewing each week, but the team is also constantly soliciting feedback from the TiVo viewers by including an email address each week (tivoreport@cnet.com). It’s so great to see viewers getting the chance to interact with their favorite shows, especially when it helps a great show get even better.
5. The Gourmet Channel: The Technique: Sweet Dough. Finally this week, I was really interested to watch The Technique’s version of a sweet dough. I really loved how Richard Bertinet took the time to explain more than just the recipe for making sweet dough. I often feel that I’m missing something in the translation from television cooking show to my home kitchen, so it’s nice to get an even more in-depth lesson on food creation.

This week’s Top 5 is a special tribute to our newest partner, Revision3. We’re more than excited to add all of the great Revision3 shows to the Video Downloads lineup…and not just because I’m a huge Totally Rad Show fanboy. Their shows have one basic thing in common: they’re a new spin on an old classic. Let me show you what I mean. Here’s my favorite Revision3 stuff from the past week.

• Wine Library TV: Episode 519 - Lambic Beer Tasting: I went wine tasting recently with a group of friends and heard one of them exclaim that they loved the way the wine tasted in their cheeks…at which point I thought I’d never understand why/how people went wine tasting. Gary Vaynerchuck’s show is exactly the opposite of that. Although he’s not tasting wine in this episode, he gives beer the same energetic and down-to-earth treatment that’s helped bring wine to those of us that previously just didn’t get it (for example, he uses bacon as a palate cleanser…awesome).
• Internet Superstar: Episode 38: When you spend all day watching internet tv like I do, it’s nice to know that someone else out there finds the hilarity in the growing stable of Internet Celebrities. This episode has Martin interviewing Marnia Orlova from HotForWords about the insults that he often endures. Classic interview show with an internet twist.
• EPIC FU: Postcard Secrets, Killing Plastic, Emo Hate: It’s no secret that I’ve been a fan of EPIC FU for a long time (in relative internet time). This week Zadi’s highlighting the PostSecret project, trying to go an entire week without using plastic…and highlighting the plight of the Russian Emo kids. Stay strong sad teens! EPIC FU’s helped me find time wasting games, great new music and kept me informed about the latest in internet pop culture. EPIC FU is my internet PBS.
• Tekzilla: Episode 46: As part of the fun of working with TiVo’s Video Download’s department I have a gigantic laptop. No really, this thing has its own time zone, gravitation field, and zip code. One of the first things one of my co-workers asked when he saw it was “So what games will it play?” It’s close, but not quite in line, with the super computers on this week’s Tekzilla. We’re big fans of Patrik and Veronica (they’ve both appeared on multiple shows on Video Downloads over the past year) so it’s the best of both worlds. Tekzilla is This Old House for Tech.
• The Totally Rad Show: Brechted - and more Comic Con!: Yes, this is my second mention of TRS in this post, but c’mon! What’s not to love about three rad dudes who are forced to review the latest in games and movies too? I discovered The Totally Rad Show this past winter and burned through all of their episodes during my trips back and forth between home and TiVo headquarters. The three hosts (Alex Albrecht, Dan Trachtenberg, and Jeff Cannata) offer informed opinions on everything from the latest movies to the classic board game “Fireball Island”. This week’s episode includes the fan Q & A from Comic Con where they once again discuss how they actually met while playing “Dungeons and Dragons”…and how even then they talked over each other. Consider it essential viewing for informed opinions on the latest in everything pop culture…and to watch Dan continue in his quest to become a man. BONUS: Each and every episode begins with a recreation of a “famous” scene.

Steve Lacy, a friend and former co-worker, has created BayDad, a blog by, for, and about dads in the San Francisco Bay Area. I’ll be blogging there a bit, and I just wrote my first post there, about The Baylands park in Palo Alto.

If you’re interested in parks, parenting, kids activities, tech useful for parents, and/or you happen to live in the area, please give BayDad a read — and if you’re interested in contributing, let me know.

Yeah, I was just kidding about that “returning 8/25″ thing. That was just excuse-making. Please to excuse.

In the meantime, here’s the number of posts I’ve managed each month.

Seasonal variation appears to apply.

BOOM.

Saturday afternoon, there’s an explosion up the street (although we didn’t hear it), and the power goes out. A transformer has blown out a block away from us.

No harm done, or so I thought (other than interrupting the Olympics I was watching; now I’ll never see that handball match between Sweden and Denmark). I took the kids up to the tot lot to play in the sand, and later Kimi picked us up to go out for sushi boats. A power cut is certainly one way to get me out of the house.

But Sunday, when I called home, the phone just kept on ringing. Turned out our home phone system (a Uniden three-handset system I had picked up several years ago at Costco) got fried when the power came back on Saturday evening, and was stuck in a permanent reboot loop.

This morning when I called Uniden for support, they walked me through a hard reset, but no luck. They had no alternatives for me — they don’t even have a repair facility at all. It was out of warranty, so toss it and buy a new one. What a waste.

Time to go back to Costco and buy a new one, right?

Well, hold on a second. The nationwide trend is towards ditching home phone service. The National Center for Health Statistics has a very interesting article and graph showing the wireless-only trend (totally random federal agency research for the win): Wireless-only households went up from 12.6% during the first six months of 2007 to 14.5% in the last six months. So, about one out of seven U.S. homes no longer have a landline.

Meanwhile, AT&T lost a million landline subscribers in their last quarter (per gigaom).

I was all set to cancel my home phone number today (despite my geeky attachment to the phone number, which ends in 8486 — spelling out TIVO as a mnemonic).

There are certainly some advantages to a home phone:

• Unlimited local minutes. Unless you’re paying a huge amount for an unlimited cell phone plan, chances are you’re paying attention to how many minutes you spend on your cell. Families with gabby teenagers need the cost convenience of a home phone with unlimited usage.
• 911 ease of mind. Despite improvements, 911 calls from a cell are not as reliable: You’re usually calling a very remote emergency center, which has more limited ability to learn your location. Additionally, cell phones can more easily run out of battery or otherwise be unavailable for use.
• Disaster/power loss ease of mind. Assuming you have a handset that doesn’t require being plugged in, when there’s a local disaster such as an earthquake, the landline is more likely to work than the cell phone.
• Archaic requirements. Some companies that you do business with really want you to have a home phone, and don’t know how to deal with you if you don’t have one. I’ve heard that one contributor to your credit score is how long you’ve had the same landline phone number.
• Inconvenience of updating all your friends and database entries: What a pain to tell everyone you know that you no longer have a home phone.
• “Home” sense: My cell phone number is only for me, and it’s usually in my pocket. My wife’s cell phone number is hers, and it’s usually in her purse. But my kids don’t have cells (too young), and what if someone wants to reach any of us but only if we happen to be at home? (Not that my kids are old enough to answer the phone yet.) But that’s what a home phone number “means”: Anyone who’s home. A cell phone doesn’t mean the same thing — it’s for a specific person, and even today a cell phone call seems more “urgent” than a call to a home phone number.

The downside of a home phone is primarily the cost (and the cost of ownership of those power-spike-vulnerable handsets): I was paying over $30 a month for unlimited local and a certain amount of included long distance.

We certainly didn’t miss having a home phone during the four months of the remodel where we weren’t home anyway. So, like I said, I was all set to ditch the home phone number. But when I can called to cancel, not surprisingly, AT&T was very willing to make me a deal to keep me as a customer. So, sucker that I am, as an experiment, before ditching our home phone service completely, I have decided to give the home phone number an extension (hah!). I’ve reduced the cost to $6 a month (plus tax) by removing call waiting, switched to a measured rate, and removed long distance.

We can still receive unlimited calls, and we pay $0.02 per outgoing call. My estimate is we make very few outgoing calls, so that it’s not worth paying $4 a month more for unlimited local calling. If I’m wrong, I can switch back to unlimited, and still save $20 a month from what we were paying.

After several months, I’ll evaluate the bills and the usage. If we no longer need the home number, I’ll join those one out of seven households that have cut the cord.

In the meantime, I have three perfectly functioning Uniden handsets, but no base station and no answering machine. If I can find a cheap replacement for the busted base station, I may replace it. If not, well, now you know why our home phone number just rings and rings when we’re not home.

Why, we’re watching the Olympics too. We’re all watching! Your favorite shows and blogs will return after the Olympics.

Zeigen.com — returning on Monday, August 25.

And now, back to our live coverage of the prelim quarterfinal qualifications of the men’s indoor short track handball 400 meter speed dressage beach trapshooting, where the welterweight Latvian team is in the medal hunt against a field of veteran Olympic athletes, including superstar Zbgnw Klrnzxst. But first, we check in with women’s table tennis. Bob?

A simple one for Friday (especially because I’m busy unpacking, leaving little time for the blog; I hate unpacking).

Next week, when driving to work, I resolve to take a different route every week. Different scenery, different traffic, a different view of the world.

Today we move back in to our house, after nearly four months of living with friends.

As is typical for a remodel, the work took twice as long and cost twice as much, although we definitely added many more items as we went along.

Our house was built in 1950, in a hurry, and previous generations of owners had done their own work, badly, and without permits. It’s a very small house, with a number of issues. Things were fine when it was just me and my brother, less fine after I married Kimi and my brother moved out, quite a bit less fine when Sammy was born, and really unacceptable after Sophie was born.

We grappled with selling it and moving (bad timing for that, though), with renting it out and living in a rental somewhere else, with knocking it down and starting over, and with torching the place to collect insurance money. Between the market, our desire to obey the law, and not wanting to be out of the house too long, we decided to remodel instead. (We do love the neighborhood and the yard.)

Ultimately, for the remodel, we:

• replaced extensive dry rot damage, especially in the master bath’s shower
• retiled that shower, and added a pocket door to the master bath (it didn’t have a door previously)
• tented for termites, sealed many open beams, and repaired lots of termite damage
• did what we could to level the floor and deal with the cracked slab foundation
• ripped out disgusting carpet and put in a hardwood-like floor
• took down some walls between the living room and kitchen and a useless corridor to open up the place
• moved the kitchen to the back of the house
• took out some awkwardly-placed side windows, put in smaller ones
• ripped out some dangerous wiring and had the electrical redone (our contractors wondered why the electrical hadn’t shorted out)
• ripped out some disastrous plumbing that was like an octopus junction; at one point, someone had snaked it, the snake had snapped off in the pipes, and they just left it there — no wonder we had always dealt with uneven draining
• took out our badly water-damaged cabinets and replaced them
• took out a load-bearing wall made out of multiple pieces of scrap wood (our contractors wondered why the house hadn’t falled down) and replaced it with a safe support column in the middle of the now large living/kitchen/dining room
• replaced our antique and difficult-to-use oven with a modern one
• added a trash compactor
• moved the microwave to an under-the-cabinet model
• replaced some clumsy French doors to the back with compact sliding doors
• removed a chimney/fireplace that took up too much space and had unsafe masonry
• replaced the fifty year old furnace (the wood above it was so charred our contractors wondered why the place hadn’t burned down)
• added a closet to what is now Sammy’s room and had previously been an office
• added a coat room near the front door (taking up the space where the fireplace had been)
• replaced a door that banged into the front door with a pocket door
• deepened a linen closet that previously had been too shallow to place a towel in, by taking up space where the master shower had been unnecessarily wide
• previously, we had ripped out a termite-ridden back deck (with wooden boards we couldn’t keep from being unsafe) and removed the 60s-era hot tub and deck area with concrete, and turned the back yard into an open lawn
• replaced some inefficient 1950s front windows with larger, modern, insulated windows
• put in new light fixtures and evened out the ceiling textures of the big room (previously, some parts were exposed beams, some parts were sheet rock, some parts were wood planks)
• repainted and added new trim/molding inside and out
• probably a dozen more things I’m forgetting

This morning we walk through it all, and start the move-in process. I’d take pictures but our cameras are packed away…

Many thanks to Bob for letting us stay in his place for 3 months, Garry & Marilyn for putting us up for a week when things ran long and Bob’s relatives came to stay, Rob & Kelly for hosting us the last week and a half, Kyrie for numerous consultations on the design and plan, and support with the kids. and most of all to my darling wife who managed the whole project.

Done! (Except for the unpacking part. That’ll take a good two months, I’m sure.)

At your favorite restaurant, order something completely out of your comfort zone, something that you’ve always wanted to try, something you don’t know if you’ll like.

Worst case, you don’t like it (and can order something else instead).

Best case, you’ve got a new favorite dish.

I sometimes find myself repeating the same clichés, expressions, and verbal shortcuts. The exercise for the rest of the week is to take one word or phrase you overuse or would prefer not to use, and not say it all.

(You can go to extremes here — consider, for example, the E-prime movement and their goal to avoid using “is.” Don’t make this too hard or you won’t do it.)

Here are some ideas:

• “Sucks.” While English desperately needs a one-syllable verb that means that something is awful, “sucks” is a pretty repellant choice, and isn’t very professional. No fair replacing it with “blows” or “bites.” Instead, consider “fails” (popular lately) or a verb phrase such as “is truly awful.”
• Swear words. Especially while at work, there are good and well-documented reasons not to swear. (Alternately, if you already never swear, then take this week as a chance to start.) I hate the traditional substitutions (such as “sugar” and “fudge”) but there’s an opportunity here to be creative and unique. My nearly-three-year-old son Sammy’s favorite word right now is “swoppy” (which has no fixed meaning to him) and I think it would make a marvelous swear. Battlestar Galactica has popularized “frak.” The 1980s film Johnny Dangerously featured Joe Piscopo’s character’s unique vocabulary, including “farging icehole.” If you’ve ever read a Tintin comic, Captain Haddock may inspire. And Shakespeare always had a curse ready.
• “You’re kidding.” Many times when people say something, the automatic response is a not-very-reassuring statement of disbelief: “Oh really?” “No way.” “Get out of here.” Instead, try the opposite: “I believe you!” “Thank you for telling me.” “That sounds right.”
• “Fine.” Someone asks you, “How are you?” Don’t answer with the rote. Be distinctive! “I’m ecstatic.” “Fair to middling.” “Better than tomorrow, but not as good as yesterday.”
• “Bless you.” Whenever she hears someone sneeze, my sister never says “bless you” in English. Instead, she uses a foreign language: Most people know the German gesundheit, but there’s a wide range traditional responses around the world.

Everyone hates some kind of music. Maybe you can’t stand rap. Or dislike classical music. Or really despise country. Or think electronica is boring and repetitive.

But it’s really more about the artist, not the genre. If you open yourself up to new experiences and try to appreciate a genre with “new ears,” you might surprise yourself.

I normally can’t stand country, but there are a few songs that have really changed my mind. Certainly classics like Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” and Kenny Rogers’ “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In).” I wouldn’t have guessed that I liked the Dixie Chicks until a friend made me listen to “Cowboy Take Me Away.”

Your mission today, should you choose to accept it:

• Head to Pandora (or install their app on your iPhone) and try out something top-rated in a new genre. You might prefer Last.FM. Even iTunes has radio stations. It’s all free.
• On your TiVo, try out the Rhapsody 30-day free trial and explore some top picks, or search using a letter at random and try out a new artist. Or download a top-rated music video from Music Choice from an artist you’ve never listened to before. (Or fire up Live 365 too.)
• Go to muxtape.com and click on someone’s name at random, then click on artist you’ve never heard of. (Odds are it’ll be something gothy, in my experience.)
• Get your rap-loving friend to play her favorite rap song and explain why she likes it. Note how infectious her enthusiasm is.
• Try a classical radio station for your drive home.
• Stop by a café with a folk artist or jazz combo playing. Live music always sounds a million times better than recorded music, anyway. Give it a try.
• Your cable or satellite company gives you free music. Head to the end of the guide and try out their electronica Chill station. Give it 20 minutes while you do some web browsing.
• Insert your idea here.

[From John T., as usual. Got ideas or feedback? Let us know! --Stephen]

This week’s top five list includes hot dogs on pizza, cats chasing lasers, and me getting pelted with index cards. Check out the best of the best in Video Downloads this week.

1. I can’t figure out whether The Onion thinks they’re really funny or if they’re just trying to save us from ourselves. This past week, they took us inside the ever-evolving world of fast food innovation. Part of me thinks that pizza topped with hot dogs would do really well.
2. Did you know you can now buy products from Amazon right from your TiVo DVR? If you were watching Media Bytes with Shelly Palmer last week you would know. Shelly covers the top tech news stories each day with a bit of commentary and a bit of snark.
3. What’s a better distraction from the news and the expanding American waistline than cute animals chasing a laser pointer? Nothing. Which is why I know I can always count on Ultra Kawaii Pets to help me unwind.
4. With the almost complete lack of interesting broadcast TV this summer, I’ve been forced to go deeper into my dial to find suitable entertainment. While surfing one Sunday I came across my new obsession: Top Gear. It’s a car show on BBC America that’s gotten me more interested in automobiles in general, which means I’m enjoying VOD Cars even more. VOD Cars is all about user-generated car video, with everything from fast laps on a track to some crazy highway driving. It’s almost enough to make me learn to drive stick.
5. Finally this week, I have to say that I enjoyed Cranky Geeks even though I ended up watching it twice on the same day. Let me explain. I was lucky enough to be invited to watch the live taping of Cranky Geeks in San Francisco last week. I had been in a meeting in their offices so I didn’t get into the studio until about 8 minutes into the show. As the lone audience member that day, I got a bit more attention than I was planning on and had the pleasure of dodging index cards for the bulk of the show. I also got to correct the Geeks during a commercial break regarding our new Amazon service, which was somewhat satisfying after spending so much time talking back to my television during their discussions over the past year. Thanks again to the Cranky Geeks folks for letting me sit in on their show!

As we get older, our routines become hardened habits. Some recent data suggests mental stimulation (through new behaviors, brain-teasing exercises, and different patterns of behavior) has important benefits (for example, in fighting Alzheimer’s).

In poker, when you get predictable, you lose. If you’re always bluffing or always playing tight, the other players pick up on that and can easily use that pattern against you. When you change your strategy mid-game, the poker term for that is “changing gears.”

So, this week, I want to change the gears of my life a bit. Each weekday I’ll post what I’m doing to “think different” — please join me, or suggest some additional ideas.

For the first gear change, I will practice some brand disloyalty. The idea of “brand loyalty” has always been a bit repellent to me, since it implies that you will slavishly use a particular product (a victim of brain-washing from its advertising, perhaps?), no matter if a better quality or cheaper alternative is available.

(Nota bena: It’s perfectly acceptable to have brand loyalty to TiVo over all other DVRs. That can be an exception to today’s exercise.)

Here are some ways I’ve thought of to be disloyal to the brands normally used:

• If you drink Coke, try Pepsi. Or vice versa. Or drink a Calistoga instead. Hell, try a V-8. But just once, because that stuff’s disgusting.
• Skip your usual chain restaurant for lunch, and try a mom & pop place.
• Mix up the words to a jingle. “Why ask why? Drink Miller Lite.” “My baloney has a first name, it’s T-Y-S-O-N.”
• Next time you’re in the grocery store, eschew a few of your regular brands and get a few products that are on sale, or better packaged, or healthier, or from a different country, compared to the ones you normally buy. Especially good for cereal, jam, bread, and snacks.
• Wear a t-shirt promoting the competition.
• If you’re a PC user, go up to a co-worker with a Mac and get them to spend 10 minutes showing you why they prefer their computer over yours. And more importantly, vice versa.

If you try this and really miss the brand you swear by, have someone help you perform a blind taste test. For example, have someone secretly pour two different brands of ketchup on your plate, then try them both with your fries and see which one you prefer. You may be surprised. Or try this blind taste test challenge on someone else in your life.

(I was interested to find via Freakonomics a study that showed that almost no one can tell the difference between a cheap wine and an expensive wine in a blind taste test.)

Did you try it? What did you find?

Now that I’ve updated this blog to the latest software and ironed out all the wrinkles, it’s very apparent how little I posted in July: Just six articles prior to today, and five of them work-related and one blog-software-related.

Partly, work has been very busy and we accomplished quite a bit in the last couple of weeks

• YouTube
• Product Purchase
• Launched in Australia
• Major web site update
• New software release for Series3 and HD units
• A bunch of other internal stuff that I can’t put here

I’ve been using FriendFeed quite a bit, sharing a few articles and comments there, and that’s the other part of why I haven’t posted here as much.

That means I didn’t write up anything at all about our trip to Pine Mountain Lake for the Fourth of July, or about Sammy’s and Sophie’s battles with impetigo (warning: Wikipeida always chooses horrific photos to accompany their disease articles; that link is not for the weak-stomached), or about our staying with three different families during our house remodeling, which is now stretching into the fifteenth week. Or even about having sushi on Friday with Steve and Andrea and Isaac, and learning their exciting news.

We’re definitely grateful to the Vallone family and to Garry & Marilyn’s family and now to my brother Rob and sister-in-law Kelly. Their hospitality is very generous, and we endlessly appreciate not having to stay in a hotel. But we’re so homesick it’s driving us all crazy.

So today we’re hoping to verify that Wednesday is our move-back-in day (when the chaos REALLY begins). And lo and behold, I’m posting here again.

The theme of my posts here this week will be “changing gears.” More on that idea to come.

Most days, the reports from our daycare (The Children’s Pre-School Center, of Palo Alto) are fairly matter of fact. Each child in the class gets a mention, and the activities are pretty much what you’d expect (story book readings, playing in the yard, learning about animals and numbers and letters).

One report, from last Tuesday, was definitely an eyebrow-raiser, however:

Sammy knows a lot of yummy foods that his Mommy and Daddy prepare at home. He named them all. They were pizza, omelet, carrot pizza, shark soup, cheese cake, and vegetable pizza. I asked him how to make omelet. He said, “You just need to make it with egg.” Wow, how smart he is.

Notable is that Sammy really doesn’t like pizza, so we don’t make it or serve it very often. And while we’re as hippy-Californian as most people in the Bay Area, there’s no way we’d make carrot pizza. That sounds awful. Furthermore, I don’t recall ever giving him cheesecake. Not even on Mother’s day at The Cheesecake Factory.

Come to think of it,  I can’t remember the last time we made omelets.

Plus shark soup? Is that like shark fin’s soup? That’s just bizarre. Isn’t it illegal?

Good job, Sammy, for not talking about hot dogs and grilled cheese like the other kids. For your third birthday in September, how about some carrot pizza?

1. Sunday is less crowded than Saturday (and at 10am the traffic was practically nothing), but next year I hope take a vacation day from work and visit it on Friday instead.
2. Mild weather trumps crowds: If the forecast shows one of the three days is much less hot than the other three, choose that day.
3. Parent to young-child ratio of 1:1 too demanding. Strollers on the dusty ground pose challenges. (Friday & daycare may be the solution.)
4. No matter how much your two-year-old says he wants to ride the carnival ride in the kids area with the Jeep 4×4s going up and down and round and round, he really won’t like it.
5. Not all garlic corn is created equal. The high school fundraising booth with $3 corn isn’t bad, but the other place has better corn.
6. Get to the free vanilla garlic ice cream both early, to avoid it being sold out and also because the more garlic-infused regular food you eat, the less your tangue can really appreciate the nuance of garlic ice cream.
7. The shade structure with the karaoke has plusses and minuses. The plusses include the shade, and available seating. The minuses include the karaoke.
8. The best spot in the whole place is the rain room.

Yvonne and baby Logan joined Kimi, Sammy, Sophie and me for the Gilroy Garlic Festival again yesterday. While I had a great time, and I feel like Sammy and Sophie loved it too, Yvonne and Kimi thought it all a bit too much with little kids. I already can’t wait for next year, though.

If all went well, you won’t see any difference.

However, it seems to have blown away all of my categories. Hmm.

EDIT: Fixed my categories, what a pain. I fixed them by following steps at this article. If you happen to have this problem with your blog when updating from 2.0x to 2.6, only the last step is actually needed (you don’t need to mess around in your phpMyAdmin page) — but you do have to repeat the step for each category. I have 30 categories, so this was annoying, but it’s done now. If you see anything else about the blog acting funky, please let me know.

EDIT THE SECOND: I’ve switched on avatars and converted from the default permalink structure to a month-and-name-based structure. (Old links will still work.)

EDIT THE THIRD: I’ve installed a plugin to make it easier to read this blog on an iPhone/iPod Touch.

If none of the above makes any sense to you, ignore it.

One last TiVo post for today: We have a new feature for Amazon Unbox on TiVo users.

You can now browse through Amazon Unbox’s entire catalog of movies and TV shows by genre.

Check it out on your broadband-connected TiVo Series2 or Series3 DVR at TiVo Central -> Download TV, Movies, & Web Video -> Amazon Unbox TV & Movies -> Browse Entire Catalog.

I didn’t get a chance to note this previously, but on Thursday, July 17, those lucky TiVo Series3 and TiVo HD owners who already have the latest software being rolled out (version 9.4) received a new feature, YouTube on TiVo.

It’ll take a couple of weeks or so before everyone using a high-def TiVo DVR gets this, but there are some exciting behind-the-scenes improvements that are involved.

• YouTube is the first content partner using streaming instead of download for video delivery.
• YouTube is our first implementation of H.264 video, a major evolution over the MPEG2-based video format that runs on all other TiVo DVR platforms.
• YouTube is the first Home Media Engine (HME) application that incorporates seamless video playback.

Unfortunately, Series2 owners will never be able to run this. The changes I mentioned require the chip technology that’s only available with the high-def boxes.

Because we now have a streaming partner, one small change: when you use the Download TV, Movies, & Web Video menu item under Find Programs & Downloads on TiVo Central (which is where you’ll find the new YouTube menu item), the title of that page used to be “Video Downloads.” But with YouTube, nothing is being downloaded. So the new title is “Broadband Video.” A small and subtle but important distinction.