As part of the new not-just-talking-about-to-do-lists approach, let me introduce the latest research project here at MCQN - The Mazzini Project.

For a while now I've been thinking about how we green all these old houses that most of us live in. One of the ideas is to help people visualize where their energy is being used. Then they can see where any is being wasted, or work out whether it's worth replacing old appliances with something newer.

I'm not the only person thinking about this: Dan Hill wrote a detailed article looking at it from a wider, neighbourhood perspective and Jon Udell wondered when he'd get an itemised bill for his electricity.

It was Jon's blog post that planted the seed which has grown to become the Mazzini project. It's still in the early stages of development, but I'm excited about the possibilities and think it could go a lot further than just measuring your power usage.

I'll talk more about the future plans, and expand on some of the thinking around the devices, in future blog posts; right now I just want to introduce the core idea, which is (I hope) explained in this slide deck. It might be easier to view it full-screen, which you can do from the slideshare page.

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The main reason for talking about this now is to find out what people think of the idea. So... what do you think? Do you want one? What's wrong with the idea? Anything else? Leave a comment here, or drop me an email at adrianm[AT]mcqn.com.