New York Times columnist David Brooks is one of my favorites. Without fail, Brooks’ weekly observations on human behavior transcend his mandate as a political and economics commentator, delivering lessons on leadership, ambition, strategy and failure relevant to anyone — especially company founders. (See my post on Brook’s recent column about behavioral breakdown among high-achievers.)

His “Pitching With Purpose” column from earlier this week has particular value. It’s about prioritizing task-oriented discipline to affect change in your work. The “work” example Brooks uses is Major League pitching, but as he notes, “[I]t’s easiest to change the mind by changing behavior, and that’s probably as true in the office as on the pitching mound.”

Brooks refers to the book “The Mental ABC’s of Pitching” by sports psychologist H.A. Dorfman, who forced behavioral regimens on his clients, including rituals and repetition, to cure pitchers who suffered from “thinking about a thousand and one things up on the mound.” Low and behold, by freeing pitchers of their so-called mental tyranny, Dorfman improved their performance, too.

We all have a success dogma that pays mental homage (or at least lip service) to discipline. But as Brooks, notes:

[Dorfman's] assumption seems to be that you can’t just urge someone to be disciplined; you have to build a structure of behavior and attitude. Behavior shapes thought. If a player disciplines his behavior, only then he will also discipline his mind.

Happily, there are several tips in Brooks’ essay to help you “free your mind”:

1) Repetition isn’t enough. Sometimes you gotta pretend.

Just as a bike is better balanced when it is going forward, a pitcher’s mind is better balanced when it is unceasingly aggressive. If a pitcher doesn’t actually feel this way when he enters a game, Dorfman asks him to pretend. If your body impersonates an attitude long enough, then the mind begins to adopt it.

2) Re-examine the geography of your workplace.

There are two locales in a pitcher’s universe — on the mound and off the mound. Off the mound is for thinking about the past and future, on the mound is for thinking about the present. When a pitcher is on the pitching rubber, Dorfman writes, he should only think about three things: pitch selection, pitch location and the catcher’s glove, his target. If he finds himself thinking about something else, he should step off the rubber.

3) Focus more on your tasks (which you control), less on how others respond to it (which you don’t).

A pitcher shouldn’t judge himself by how the batters hit his pitches, but instead by whether he threw the pitch he wanted to throw.

4) Focusing on the task at hand will keep you from thinking about how it reflects on you.

A baseball game is a spectacle, with a thousand points of interest. But Dorfman reduces it all to a series of simple tasks. The pitcher’s personality isn’t at the center. His talent isn’t at the center. The task is at the center.

Dorfman’s discipline theory is rooted in his original belief that “it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master any craft — three hours of practice every day for 10 years.” Have you mastered your craft? By his measure, I’m nowhere close to mastering mine, but after reading Brooks’ column, I’m only too eager to “free my mind” and get more disciplined about it.

This post was originally posted on Found/Read; it has been excerpted and modified for GigaOM.

If you’ve ever tried to use one of those carbon footprint calculator web sites, then you’ll likely understand why mobile entrepreneur Andreas Zachariah would try to build a better way. Zachariah has been working on a java-based mobile application called Carbon Hero, which uses GPS location info to automatically monitor your transportation. Earth2Tech has the full story.

Early-bird tickets for our first official GigaOM conference, Structure 08, are only available until midnight Monday, April 7th. Structure 08 will gather the most innovative and influential industry leaders together to explore the latest Internet infrastructure buildout. Among our scheduled keynote speakers are Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, and Greg Papadopoulos, CTO of Sun Microsystems.

The conference will sort through the emerging and disruptive computing technologies and inform businesses on how best to leverage them. And it will provide insight to investors and executives on the best implementations, ideas and startups out there today — and what to look for tomorrow. Structure 08 will take place on June 25th at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. To buy early-bird tickets, please go here.

The head of UK Internet provider Talk Talk says he doesn’t want to be the recording industry’s policeman. A noble stance is there ever was one — until you recall that Charles Dunstone’s ISP is one of the ones using ad insertion software from Phorm (albeit on an opt-in basis).

In an interview with the BBC, Dunstone said, “Our position is very clear. We are the conduit that gives users access to the Internet. We do not control the Internet, nor do we control what our users do on the Internet.” Notice he says nothing about watching what type of sites those users visit and profiting off that knowledge.

Nevertheless, the recording industry’s efforts to stop illegal downloads by soliciting help from the ISPs is repugnant. Are you listening, Virgin Media? Getting a private company to enforce federal laws leads to uneven enforcement and a lack of transparency that a democratic society should abhor.

If illegal downloads are so bad, then it’s the government’s job to figure out how to police it, much like it polices the borders of Mexico and Canada in the U.S. looking for illegal activity. Like the highways that can be used to ferry drugs, cheap souvenirs and maple syrup, the Internet delivers pirated music, emails and photos of grandchildren. If illegal music is so harmful, then politicians need to direct their time and effort to stopping it — and risk whatever censure voters give them.

The folks at Pingdom have come up with a graph that shows the growth in the number of web sites over the years. While it is an interesting graph, I would like to point out that it’s an informal data set. Enjoy!

Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur outlines 20 reasons why his company bought Twhirl, an Adobe AIR-based Twitter client that is preferred by the self-obsessed net-set (including yours truly). Some see it as a future-of-the-web move. The Valley echo chamber seems to agree.

I’m stingy with such compliments. In my opinion, the 21st (and real) reason why Loic bought this little client: users. Twhirl is very popular these days; it accounts for 7 percent of the traffic on Twitter, putting it in a good position to help Seesmic — whenever it comes out of alpha/beta/gamma testing — attract new users to its service very quickly. (Of course, Twitter fame can be fleeting, forgotten the minute the net-set discovers the next new shiny shiny.)

Seesmic, in simple terms, is a video Twitter-type service, but I have grappled with two questions: What is Seesmic’s utility, and what pain point is it trying to solve? The company showed off its service at our NewTeeVee Live conference and Loic was recently on The GigaOM Show trying to explain the service, but I still don’t quite get it. Perhaps, Alan Patrick over on BroadStuff puts it best,

Videoblogging has a limited runway compared to text blogging (today at any rate) and this is a way for Seesmic to shift its focus from video to overall ‘microblogging.’

The open access restrictions mandated by the Federal Communications Commission on portions of the recently auctioned 700 MHz spectrum were among the main reasons AT&T chose not to bid for that spectrum but opted instead to pay more for that of the B-Block, which complements the slice they bought from Aloha Partners, according to AT&T Wireless President and CEO Ralph de la Vega.

Verizon Wireless paid $4.74 billion for a majority of the C block spectrum, while AT&T picked up 227 licenses in the B block of regional licenses. Verizon forked out $9.63 billion on spectrum licenses, and AT&T ponied up $6.64 billion. Some on Wall Street have criticized AT&T for paying too much for the Aloha Partners slice of the 700 MHz spectrum, but it seems like AT&T thinks paying a premium so it doesn’t have to share the network with others was worth it. “Our strategy was to acquire the spectrum that complemented our spectrum we acquired from Aloha,” de la Vega said on a conference all with reporters.

He pointed out that the company has enough wireless spectrum to cover 87 percent of the total U.S. population and 100 percent of the nation’s top 200 cities. Also during the call, AT&T officials said the 4G LTE wireless broadband networks based on the 700 MHz spectrum will roll out in 2012. De la Vega said the company has a road map to push the 3G speeds quite high — up to 14.4 megabits per second. (I am checking on this bit as my notes got a little smudged, the risk you run when writing with an old-fashioned ink pen.)

(I will update with details from interviews with AT&T executives.)

When I asked de la Vega whether AT&T would work with anyone outside of their traditional vendors, he said the company wants to explore all options and would be open to working with new suppliers, especially if they have interesting technologies and price points. In other words, don’t be surprised to see some Asian vendors bidding for the 700 MHz business.

As a new parent, I am constantly faced with the dilemma of how to best keep my extended family in the loop with regards to events in my daughter’s life. I could easily start a blog, on which I could post written updates along with images. But I would prefer not to have the entire web be “in the know” about what my family is up to; I really only want that information to be consumed by my close friends and family. I could password-protect the posts, of course, but that would create a barrier for the less technically savvy of my family members. And emailing photos and event updates just seems too…Web 1.0, for lack of a better phrase.

Enter Sampa. The service is best described as a secure, weblog-style site on which families can post events, videos, pictures and stories. And it was built with security and simplicity in mind.

You start by naming your Sampa site, creating a personal profile, and building the site’s look and feel. Then fill out your first post — whether it be a story, video, picture or other message — followed by the contact information of the friend/family member with whom you’d like to share it. They are subsequently sent an email containing a private URL to your post.

The barriers to adoption are low. With the private URL, Grandpa and Grandma don’t have to remember their username and password. Not do they have to constantly check the site for updates, because every time you update it, Sampa sends them an email.

If you’re seeking an easy-to-use content management system to run a web site, give Sampa a look. Their hosted solution is an attractive option for both the content creator and end user alike.

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• Web Worker Daily: Desperately seeking the perfect web app.
• Earth2Tech: Green home solutions provider Standard Renewable Energy raises $15 million.

If you are a resident of one of the major US metros - Los Angeles, New York, or San Francisco - then there is a good chance you have a love-hate relationship with your mobile carrier. You love your phone, when on rare occasions the calls don’t drop off. And rest of the time you experience mobile rage.

Apparently, there are some places in the US where the phone experience is actually pretty good. The Nielsen Company’s Nielsen Mobile service has released a report that reveals the Top 10 Cities with best voice coverage and wireless data connections. They are not necessarily the same. We put it in a nice handy map for quick referral. No NY, SF, and LA don’t make the list.

Cities with top ten voice networks averaged a 99.2% successful call rate; on average, 0.3% of all calls in these cities were dropped. Among the cities with top ranked 3G data networks, the average download speed for a 4 megabyte (MB) file was 727 kbps—an increase of more than 100 kbps over the top market average measured during the second half of 2006. Nielsen defines a “successful call” as one established and maintained for at least two minutes.

In 2008 when industry is espousing a wireless broadband future, completing and maintaining a phone call for at least 2-minutes is seen as an achievement.. go figure!