It’s been an incredible past year at Mashable, action packed with more peak experiences than I can name here. I was blessed with the opportunity to attend the unparalleled TED conference in Long Beach along with a multitude of other excellent events from CES to CTIA, SXSW to E3 and many more. I got a chance to interview amazing folks undertaking innovative and interesting projects in social media and technology, from Tears for Fears’ Curt Smith to The Roxy’s Nic Adler, iPad DJ Rana Sobhany to cancer activist Clark Harris (aka @SilentClark), forward thinkers like Nokia’s Henry Tirri and inspiring prodigy Adora Svitak.

On top of all that I had the opportunity to speak at events including CES, Gravity Summit, and the SXSW Tweet House as well as speak to students at Emerson College’s #ESM Social Media class and make media appearances on Nikki Sixx’s Sixx Sense show, Marsha Collier’s excellent Computer and Technology Radio program, NewsTalk 1010, co-host This Week in Android and more. I also got a chance to meet the cast of Simon Fuller’s If I Can Dream, promote independent and social media-aware music and artists in the long-running Free Music Monday series, meet veritable boatloads of brilliant people working in the SM/tech space, and even enjoy the surreal experience of attending a reality show wedding.

In short, it’s been a wild ride. I will greatly miss the team and plan to continue cheering on the Mashable brand from the sidelines. I’ll be hitting the ground running at the new gig this coming Monday, heading up content programming and strategy at a new CE destination I look forward to being able to tell everyone more about as we get closer to actually launching! In the meantime: stay tuned and stay in touch! And to my dearest Team Mash: so long and thanks for all the lolcats. We’ll always have Twitter. And Facebook. And Flickr. And Posterous. And… gosh, this social media thing is awfully convenient, innit?

Along with that big move news, and actually completely unrelated, is another change: I’ve accepted an offer to take on the role of Senior Editor at Mashable.com. I’m excited to be returning to a focus on social media and social tech and working with a top-notch team at a destination that’s been in my daily feed reading since 2005.

It’s been a great year working with the fine folks at Crowd Fusion and I wish the team there all the best. I can’t really talk yet about some of the cool things coming up there and how it might mean some continued involvement with the platform, but rest assured we are parting on good terms and I have high hopes for the continued success of the company.

In between NY and CA I managed to squeeze in a bit of on the road Kerouac-style vacation, driving coast to coast in my trusty ’98 Toyota Corolla whose awesome gas mileage had me going 8 hours at a stretch before a refill with those pesky non-renewable fossil fuels. I was 13 days on the trip and only had 1 night of hotel (richly enjoyed in Deadwood, SD), staying with friends and family along the way and having many memorable adventures. The last time I made a cross-country trek was back in the Triassic Period of 1997, and this trip shared with it 2 very important pit-stops: Chicago, and Wall Drug, SD. If you’ve ever been to Wall Drug, or if you’ve even just driven on 90W through South Dakota, you know what I’m talking about.

In the “I get by with a little help from my friends” Acknowledgements section I must extend heaping amounts of gratitude to all the folks who helped make this move possible: Julia, Jackie & Joe, Mrs. Perrone (who performed the very vital role of cleaning supervisor), Chris Willett and Bobby the plumber, the affable Sears repair dude, the last-minute roofer who also regaled me with stories about his recent cross-country trips, Dounan (ice cream and heavy lifting), Meryl (fire-starter), Shane and Scott at Certified Properties, Jason and Danielle my awesome tenants, Leah and Amelia (refreshments and PA system adoption), Laura Darlington (LA intelligence ground team, Bowflex consultation), Eliot (interim home office), Dan, Diane, Erin and Ryan O’Halloran (adopted family in (too) sunny Burbank), Judith (encouragement and shared brain matter), CK (covering for my vacationing ass, etc.), Daddy Bowen (spiritual road-trip presence), Mom and Jo-Jo, Ruby (Cleveland party planner), Sam Axon (provider of Chicago food, pad, improv and Kerouac library), Tam and Lauren (Presidents of the Minneapolis Secret Spoon Society), Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane, Sarge (Denver hail and smoke), Dad and Joy (Albuquerque welcoming committee), Dawn (Vegas MC and encouragement), ABF U-Pack, WestSideRentals, Peter’s Movers, Rory the super super at Carseka Apts., Clotho and the Norns, and everyone else whose inclusion would turn this section into a paperback novel.

If you’re in the LA social tech scene, I look forward to meeting you! One such opportunity happens to be coming up this Friday at the Mashable Hyatt4Good Tweetup Tour — I’ll be there with bells on, etc. If you’re not in LA but have occasion to visit, give me a shout and let’s meet up! I’ll be here whenever I’m not travelling to events, trying vainly to Do Everything Cool — a Sisyphean task if ever there was one. If you know of anything in town I Absolutely Must See, let me know that too!

These are so frakking brilliant.

MySpace slashes head count by 30 percent | The Social – CNET News.

The tagline reads “MySpace is a place for friends.” No, it’s not. It’s a place for scum-sucking, bottom-feeding, spam-spewing trolls to post mindless blinking affiliate marketing links all over creation. If “this hurts me more than it hurts you” Van Natta wants to turn that ship around they have to start treating the social network like a community that it sadly once was, heinous crimes against HTML and all, instead of like a wishful money-printing machine that occasionally requires light watering for maintenance.

Seriously, that place is a cesspool.

via Forbes.com CEO Spanfeller Attacks Google, Stumbles Into His Own Cesspool.

First of all, this entire article from Danny Sullivan is a great and astute dismantling of Spanfeller’s “argument” — very enjoyable read. Second of all, I just wanted to comment on how it’s a very fascinating time to be covering technology news and witnessing a lot of huge companies from the analog era still floundering and failing to comprehend how and why the internet is eating them for lunch. As Sullivan aptly points out in the article, these companies and these industries have had years to see all this coming. The writing has been on the wall for some time, yet in all the content industries that stood to be most affected, very little was done to adapt. First in music, then in film, now in TV and publishing there appears to be some critical mass of desperation. Avoidance, massive lawsuits, walled gardens, inflating prices and whining for bailouts haven’t panned out. What’s next? Innovation or collapse.

To pick apart the above statement more finely — it’s curious to me that the CEO of a financial publication can unironically be doubting the value proposition of distribution. Are cable providers being disproportionally compensated for what is fundamentally other people’s work? Is Amazon.com being disproportionally compensated for peddling other people’s wares? Is Apple unfairly being enriched by that whole iTunes Music Store thing where they distribute content made by other people? Even as the cost of distribution falls, the value of distribution is still as high as ever — perhaps even moreso, as the flood of available content continues to increase and it becomes ever more difficult to filter. Google devised a solution to a problem they had the foresight to envision emerging. Twitter offers an intriguing and new twist on the concept of distribution channels, an idea so powerful that Facebook flat out copied it.

What publishers are really saying amidst this mess is that “people ought to like and find valuable our professionally-produced content.” While there’s a shadow of logic in there somewhere, no amount of stepping up to a podium and saying “people should read us” is going to move the needle whatsoever. A hungrier technology industry with less to lose and everything to gain has come in and offered people a treasure trove of alternatives to what “professional” publishers are offering (many of them becoming “professional” themselves along the way) along with new, interesting, fast and ultra-convenient distribution methods to find, filter and consume it. The game has changed completely and content industries are still devoting exorbitant resources in a vain attempt to roll back the rulebook instead of cultivating some hussle, summoning some hutzpah and diving into the game. Stop whining, start playing!

“We’re looking, of course, at ways to extract payments from the consumers of our news — micro-payments, subscriptions, memberships, licensing, even voluntary donations,” Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, said last week in a speech at Stanford University.

Time Inc. EVP John Squires used strikingly similar language in a recent statement about figuring out how to “save magazines”: these guys are busy scratching their brains about how to “get a payment from a consumer.”

So what’s missing here? How about any discussion of how to actually provide better value to the consumer? Or perhaps how to reach consumers in the new landscapes they’re inhabiting? Nope. We don’t hear much about that. It’s all fire and brimstone about how consumers have the audacity to skim headlines to absorb the news (did these guys think people read newspapers cover to cover when they come on paper?) or how Google dared to invent a way to find stuff you were looking for on the internet easily. Serving customers better value for less cost? The nerve! That’s just downright sleaz… oh wait, that’s one of the fundamental tenets of business.

This is symptomatic of a larger disease going on in business that Bob Sutton describes astutely in a piece on Why Management is Not a Profession. Business schools teach future management that the game is almost solely about “extracting value.” Mr. Keller and Mr. Squires apparently both paid attention in class, and they’re not the only ones. This model reveals capitalism in its ugliest form — an elaborate shell game in which value is artificially inflated to harvest more payment from consumers, who often have poor alternatives to forking over that $0.10 carriers tell them is reasonable cost to send 160 characters of data, or who live in areas monopolized by providers who decide 40 GB of data at the same price as the previous unlimited plan is completely logical.

If these MSM goons want to save their businesses they’d better get schooled in how to make themselves relevant to the consumers they so desperately want to extract more value from, because at the moment it’s entirely logical to sympathize less, not more, with their plight.

“We’re frustrated with the way amateur and professional outlets are appropriating AP content,” the organisation’s director of strategic content, Jim Kennedy, told Forbes. “When the Red River in Fargo rises, we want people to go to the Fargo Forum. But searching for the Red River on Google might also send you to the London Telegraph.”

This just in from the Hail Mary Pass department: looks like the fourth estate is still following suit on the suit strategy of the RIAA/MPAA; they apparently plan to take legal action against a host of unnamed perps using their content inappropriately. Who these news-thieving bastards are the Associated Press doesn’t specify, and although they struck a deal several years ago with Google for use of AP content online the above quote is a very strangely passive aggressive dig at search engines who apparently are guilty of having the audacity to lead users to legitimate news sources the AP would rather you not visit.

Very curious, indeed.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

via Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky.

9 is a surreal post-apocalyptic nightmare in which all of humanity is threatened, being produced by Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov (of Wanted fame), directed by former WETA Digital artist Shane Acker, and featuring the music of Danny Elfman. Add a star-studded voice cast to taste (Elijah Wood, Christopher Plummer, Jennifer Connelly, Crispin Glover, etc.) and this looks like a must see.

[via 9 Movie Trailer | /Film.]

BTW I discovered this via Hulu on my Xbox 360 thanks to PlayOn, a recent discovery in the media streamer department I’m really digging.