Looking back, it’s been a momentous year for me. Fresh into the first week in ’08, I took up an amazing job at the Decision Theater.

In 2008, the words that made an impact, in no particular order have been:

• ‘CleanTech‘ is very exciting and relevant to my job, my family, my community. I don’t have to be a technology writer to want to explore it further.

• Sustainability, which once seemed like a big word for making responsible decisions about forests and oceans, is now a lens through which we look at entire economic, social and business systems.

• The obscure instrument called a ‘mortgage backed security‘ could unhinge our economy, including the free-fall of house prices in Birmingham, Alabama and Birmingham, England, the price of a gallon of gas, and a ‘cheap’ tree ornament made in China.

• An ‘aerotropolis‘ which is a compressed urban environment around a commercial airport could revitalize community life.

• The phrase ‘lipstick on a pig‘ became a silly diversion in the run up to the elections, but also stuck out as how quickly, an unplanned cosmetic element of a campaign could generate buzz.

• The word ‘Outlier‘ which has been cropping up, has a mathematical connotation. As in: ‘numerically distant from the rest of the data.’

• Android, the mobile operating system from Google, could be the OS we all gravitate to.

• Meatball Sundae –a book by Seth Godin that was actually published in Dec ’07 – is the notion that applying new marketing on top of traditional products can have a gross results.