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.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the media business is being turned upside down by our new freedoms and our new roles. We’re not just readers anymore, or listeners or viewers. We’re not customers and we’re certainly not consumers. We’re users. We don’t consume content, we use it, and mostly what we use it for is to support our conversations with one another, because we’re media outlets now too. When I am talking about some event that just happened, whether it’s an earthquake or a basketball game, whether the conversation is in email or Facebook or Twitter, I want to link to what I’m talking about, and I want my friends to be able to read it easily, and to share it with their friends.”

Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers « Clay Shirky.

• The first African-American President of the Unites States of America. I hope this goes a long way toward starting to heal the rift still left behind by the history of slavery in this country and white society’s lack of reparations.
• John McCain’s extremely classy concession speech (and some dunderhead Republican booers)
• Obama won an unprecedented number of battleground and traditionally Republican states including Ohio, Virginia, Florida, Pennsylvania and Indiana.
• A record number of young voters turned out to vote in this election, many for the first time. Up 6% in participation from 2004 for 18 to 29-year-olds.

For me the evening was emotional and awe-inspiring. Between Twitter, Facebook, SMS, voice and a constant stream of news from various sources I felt both plugged in and informed as well as surrounded by friends and other exuberant Obama supporters experiencing a profound moment in history together. That point is made even more poignant by the fact that the Obama campaign itself made brilliant strategic use of the internet and social media to reach out to a more diverse audience of new voters, youth voters, voters of color, and apathetic voters who were finally moved by a candidate who listens carefully, responds mindfully, and speaks authentically a message of re-unification for a country ideologically divided and facing great challenges.

Last night many Americans felt the power of the democratic process in a way we have not felt passionately about in some time. For me it feels like a re-awakening, an indication of the hunger for growth and self-actualization in America’s citizenry, and a powerful groundswell of hope for things to come.

On a much lighter note… after the break I’ve collected some “Obamagery” — user-created or mashed up visual expression of our new President.

marketing that doesn’t suck by AirBed & Breakfast, the very cool social couch-surfing site

[thx Erik!]

[via 1up]

from Obey Giant who got a thank you note from Barack himself… so classy

Great op-ed over on The Escapist about the recent zombie invasion in World of Warcraft.

All of which makes total sense. I like to file this general trend under the heading “people like to do stuff.” Broadcast media had its day because it was technologically easier than providing a platform for interactivity — not because passive reception is something inherent in human nature. Human nature is inherently interactive, not passive. Thus as we give people more tools to collect, create and share things they care about online — they’re naturally going to use them.

I am looking forward to seeing the “creators” group continue to grow especially. I am totally with Will Wright on the idea that people like to make stuff. I take inspiration from the experience recounted with the launch of the Spore Creature Creator, where Maxis and EA expected to reach 100,000 creatures created in total between the time the Creature Creator launched in June and the full Spore game was released September 7 — instead they hit that figure within a couple of hours and within 18 days had reached 1,589,000 user-created species prompting Wright’s memorable quip that Spore users are 38% God. Humans are creative by nature. After years of media largely tightly controlled by a small number of vested interests, it’s totally amazing to be living in this time of tools and tinkering.