I’ve gone and done it. I’ve volunteered my face in the war against prostate and testicular cancer, two great killers of men.

That’s right, I’ve agreed to grow a sweet, bad-ass mustache this month as part of the “Movember movement.” It’s a fundraiser against cancer.

I’m not doing this only because I want a sweet, bad-ass mustache. I’m doing this for other reasons too. I hope you’ll watch this brief video that explains why. Sorry, no cats or explosions in this video.

If you love men and hate cancer, I hope you’ll visit my Movember page and consider donating in the name of my hairy upper lip. I will frequently post pics and videos with mustache updates; you won’t want to miss those. I’m thinking about going with the Hulkamania model. Cancer is terrified of Hulk Hogan.

Even Target is making it easy to recycle your old gadgets.

Your amazing toys are full of toxic materials that have no business in a landfill. Do the right thing.

By American lifestyle standards, we should have been homeowners many years ago. We co-habitated, and moved into a rental. Then we got married, and moved into a new (quieter and nicer) rental. Then we got ready to start a family, and we moved into a new (larger and more convenient to work) rental.

At any of those spots, we might have bought a home. But there was this bubble in real estate. So we stayed out.

After years of waiting, and two kids, we’re finally jumping in. Why now? Well, a number of personal reasons, but also a number of macroeconomic reasons, including where I think interest rates, inflation, and access to credit are going, and some microeconomic reasons, namely all the IPOs minting new millionaires at Bay Area startups in 2012.

And then this appeared in my mailbox:

Hope that bodes well.

It’s been an action-packed month. So action-packed, it took my grandma to remind me to update this site.

I know, my grandma chiding me to “update your blog” via my Facebook wall… I get it, I’m a cliche.

OK, so here’s what happened this month.

YouTube partnered with the good folks from TED on Ads Worth Spreading, a global contest to recognize exciting, poignant, and touching ads. Because how do ideas get spread in 2011? You guessed it.

The program was a smash, including some very kind coverage in the New York Times (including my first ever quote in the Gray Lady). Plus, I got to go to TED, where I had a three-hour dinner chat with the director of Napoleon Dynamite, and I saw someone print a human kidney out of cultured tissue. I am unworthy.

Why did YouTube enter into this partnership, besides for the free trip to Long Beach? Because online video is about not watching ads. At YouTube we’re finding ways of creating an entirely opt-in advertising experience for our users. And it takes great creative to make that work.

I also made my podcast debut on Earwolf’s “Wolf Den,” which focuses on the business of podcasting and emerging media. I’m a huge fanboy of Earwolf’s podcasts, including their flagship Comedy Death Ray. I think I got a little ranty at times, but it’s only because I’m so excited about the business models that are springing out of the booming podcast/streaming media ecosystem. No, really.

Finally, I got my kid into a good San Francisco public elementary school, and I think my wife and I bought a house. Negotiations are in progress.

How’s that, grandma?

CES is most certainly a circle of Hades. But for all its logistical Hellscapes, it can only get one thinking about the future.

Smart TV is the real deal, but we are barely starting. Now, the systems are disparate and slow, the UIs are generally clunky messes, and the controls are clumsy. But this will be a real experience-changer.

3D TV is not the real deal. You have people coming over to watch football. Are you sure you have enough of the proprietary, battery-powered glasses for everyone? Glasses-free 3D is still experimental at best.

The biggest problem is that “immersiveness” eventually hits a wall. I tried out a 3D version of a combat game on PlayStation Move, and after three minutes the headache was undeniable. I couldn’t even imagine the most overstimulated 17-year-old playing an extended marathon of this.

Leaning back: The notion that people only want to veg out in front of the TV is pretty antiquated. First, we’re already been interacting with our TVs for years, whether it’s channel surfing, searching for shows in our DVRs, or playing Wii. We’re used to this type of behavior in 2011. Look around anywhere and you’ll see people interacting with devices all day long. If anything, the frustration isn’t that the TV requires you to interact, it’s that the interfaces and controls are so horribly inferior to those on your Droid or iPad.

And when you want to, you can still turn your brain off and watch a show about bitchy housewives or fancy cakes.

The Magnavox Promise is dead. I can’t tell whether TVs are supposed to be long-term purchases anymore. There was a time when a new TV was supposed to last for a generation, and TVs advertised themselves as such.

The TVs at CES, loaded with 3D and proprietary web OSes, are burdened with what could be described as bridge technologies. The people buying these TVs are also used to buying new phones every 24 months, and new PCs every 4-5 years. Will the TV upgrade cycle also compress like this? Imagine buying, say, a Sylvania Connected TV with Sylvania Apps. Think that will still be relevant in 10 years? Maybe the great tech growth industry is e-waste recycling.

OMMA Video

Today is our 10th anniversary.

This seems like a great opportunity to play Our Song.

His reasoning is that Yahoo (sorry, I’m not going to include the exclamation point) can be a gigantic-scale platform for developers.

Indeed, Yahoo is very big — bigger than most people realize. When I worked there two years ago, I would often shock Bay Area technorati types with basic facts about Yahoo’s position. Number one in email. Number one in news. Number one in sports. Number one overall page on the web (since eclipsed by Google.com).

Long forgotten by Sili Valley types who watched Google build an information empire and Facebook a social media kingdom, Yahoo remained and still remains a force across the world.

(Full disclosure: My wife still works there, editing their women’s site Yahoo Shine, which is itself immensely successful in reaching its core audience of young women. I also still have some very good friends who work at Yahoo.)

When I worked there, Yahoo was decidedly a company adrift. Bad news — China dissidents, the collapse of the Microsoft merger, high-profile attrition, leaked discontent — seemed to overwhelm senior management, who themselves weren’t rah-rah types conditioned to keep the rank-and-file engaged.

But in spite of the consistent ugliness, Yahoo has soldiered on and even improved some of its best assets. The new, bolder Flickr is a huge improvement for the broadband age. The home page, stocked with great editorial and optimized to the user, still makes it nearly impossible not to click on something. My Yahoo is still the default home page for millions. Yahoo News and Sports are still the very best editorially-driven experiences in those categories. Yahoo has powerful market share in many emerging and established global markets. And Yahoo’s loyal user base across mail and IM remains its greatest asset. All those properties (except Flickr) are chock full of ad units, keeping everything comfortably monetized. So there’s a lot of goodness coming out of Sunnyvale.

Is Yahoo going to be a powerful developer platform in 2015? Maybe. Maybe not. While Yahoo’s scale, neutrality, and brand trust are undeniable, the expectations of Yahoo’s user base is still significantly different in character from those of Apple or Google or RIM. And hiring the right people to do this kind of thing — building out and managing a development platform — is crazy-hard in 2010. Double-digit unemployment doesn’t apply to web and mobile technologies; just check out the job listings at any big tech company for the evidence.

It may not even matter. Yahoo never developed a serious RSS reader. Did that matter? There’s still no evidence that people will want to run custom apps on a web page, Farmville be damned. (Facebook’s value is the social graph, not the web canvas.)

Either way, Yahoo is still huge. It can be bigger. It can be better. And Sili Valley is foolish to forget it.

I’ve recently been having a lot of conversations with people about how we consume media. The transition from three broadcast networks to an era of seeing anything you want on any screen is utterly profound, and incredibly interesting to anyone who has watched TV or gone to the movies in their lifetimes.

I’m going to be blogging more about this new world that we’re all hurtling towards, but we’ll start with part one, which is the creative lead that television took over movies in the mid-2000s.

Traditionally, movies told the great stories. In the 1970s, the silver screen flashed The Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, Star Wars, Chinatown, Annie Hall, Nashville (my favorite). Hollywood could make movies for niches, while the three-channel universe of TV tried to attain the broadest possible audience. As a result, none of the shows were really that great. The classic movies from that era are still brilliant. The classic TV shows are unwatchable for anything but nostalgia or camp. Unlike the movies of their era, few of these shows have found new audiences.

By the mid-2000s, the script flipped. With each cable network angling to air a must-see show in order to maintain their affiliate fees, the creativity on cable exploded. Meanwhile, the movies have become devoid of stories as compelling as those of Breaking Bad or The Wire.

As Mark Harris writes on EW.com (“What’s wrong with this summer’s movies?“):

Four or five years ago, it was a jaunty provocation to claim that ”TV is better than the movies” (a phrase that headed articles in TIME, Newsweek, and EW). Today, it’s just a fact. TV can be programmed for niche audiences; these days, studios only know how to spend too much money in order to lunge after too many eyeballs. TV actually tests its ideas before they air with pilots; studios just try to imagine what the poster will look like. Most significantly, TV can react quickly to a changing zeitgeist, whereas movies now take ridiculously long to respond to anything, if they even try…

As TV has surged, the risk-averse souls atop the movie studios have stopped pretending that their job is anything other than to find and greenlight renewable, easily marketed franchises for undemanding audiences on big weekends.

Is it any wonder Hollywood is charging hard into formats like 3D and IMAX? Unable to compete creatively with niche-seeking shows, movies have to compete on the screen and images.

But TV didn’t achieve its golden age via its legacy channels. The great shows are almost exclusively on cable networks. Legacy broadcast networks have gone the way of movies, weighed down with replica cop franchises and formula sitcoms. Tina Fey said upon accepting her first Emmy for 30 Rock that network television today is like vaudeville in the ’60s. The times, they have already changed.

Indeed, the broadcast networks have been forced to dial down their creative edge, as niche audiences have already migrated to cable shows. Or video games. Or the Internet. The top-rated show on TV today can only hope to get half the audience of the top show of 10 years. Put another way, 85% of Americans don’t watch the number one show. We’ve come a long way from I Love Lucy.

So what happens when YouTube, with its 2 billion daily video streams, comes to TV? That’s the next game-changer. And that’s the next blog post…

(Click to enlarge)

That’s what it looks like when a trading error and automated reactive systems drive a stock from $40 to $0.01.

Somebody got fired yesterday. And somebody else got really, really rich.