In just the past couple years, I’ve noticed something: My colleague John Murillo, who shoots and edits video for TechCrunch TV, has increasingly become one of the most popular people in any room he enters. Anywhere we go on the days we shoot video, whether it’s a startup office or just a pub to grab some lunch, everyone wants to strike up a conversation with him to ask about his camera equipment. The lenses, the shutter speed, the megapixels. It’s become clear that it’s no longer just the professionals or the early adopters who are into talking about gadgets – nowadays, it’s the mainstream. The people over at Engadget, the gadget-oriented blog (that disclosure: is owned by AOL, which owns TechCrunch too), say they’ve noticed the same thing. So over the past few days they’ve launched a top-to-bottom site redesign, with a host of new interactive features, aimed at appealing to a larger-scale audience – an Engadget that’s not just for the early adopters, but for “the early adopter in all of us.”
