A guest blog post from Christian Renaud originally posted to his blog on January 21, 2009.

There are good things and bad things when discussing the trade-off between privacy and transparency.  Back in the days when I frequented many a Santa Fe Institute lecture, there was lengthy discourse about The Beer Game, which simulates a distribution system for beer sellers with knobs to allow for certain levels of transparency from retail to distribution to wholesale.  The point of the exercise is to determine 'How much transparency is too little, and how much is too much'.    If you don't expose your retail demand in a timely fashion, you end up having no inventory.  If you expose too much, you end up 'flapping' your distribution chain with wild inventory swings.

I think back on this exercise frequently when it comes to the Internet+Social Media, and the blood/brain barrier of privacy and transparency.  Should I share my trip details, or keep them private?  What efficiencies (e.g. catching dinner with friends also in town) do I miss by omitting my travel plans from my blog, etc...

So I arrived home from work one night and as I progressed from the "drop zone" to the kitchen something immediately caught my eye.  I am a pretty observant person and when things aren't right, I notice them.  A light bulb goes out.  I notice. Something rearranged differently on the counter; I can pick it out.  So within the first 2 seconds of entering the kitchen I noticed the plastic vent cover on our GE microwave was missing.

So it has been a very hot summer.  It seems as if for most of the summer the highs have been in the mid to upper 90's while breaking triple digits at least once or twice a week.  You add some humidity to the pot and it feels like you are burning up once your skin hits the light of the sun. So it goes as no surprise that with the added heat comes substantial personal swampiness.  To counteract the feeling we do things like take more showers.  We may lather on the deodorant a bit heavier as well.  I may have done both.

So I have been using the Bawte app for more than two weeks now.  I have tagged a lot and seen a lot of tags fly by on my activity lists. I am starting to notice some trends amongst the early Bawte users, as well as some benefits the application provides that I hadn’t envisioned initially.  First, the trends...

Over the course of my life, I have been teased for being smart, tall, nerdy, organized, loud…and, I am sure, many more things I am not even aware of!  But now I am getting teased for grocery shopping.  Not just for going grocery shopping, but going grocery shopping…let’s say…frequently.  For years I have made grocery shopping a sport, competed with myself to get the best deal possible.  To never pay more than $2 for a box of cereal.  To use multiple versions of the same coupon to stock up on toilet paper or toaster strudel.  To make multiple visits to the same store to bypass store-imposed purchasing limits.  I have been doing this as long as I can remember.  I am only now being teased for it, however.

This is the first blog post by Mary, our Director of Education at Bawte

As a consumer, I am what you would call “slow to adopt”.  I am not one to seek out new technology and I am never the first one on the block to have or use anything technological in nature.  I have a long history of jumping on a bandwagon after its driven by.  In fact, it usually takes a new bandwagon to start forming before I consider a jump to the old one.