It’s been a totally unpredictable year for me, as I am sure it was for you.

While I wanted to say Thank You to my readers, friends and family, former colleagues at ASU, I also wanted to share with all of you the core of what I believe in when it comes to the intersection of traditional and new media.

I call it the Four Cs. I realize there may be five, or seven. But think of these as four lenses through which you could clarify what’s happening to marketing, PR, media and advertising. It was a result of a mixed year.

• It was an exciting year. I had a front seat in seeing communication change at a once top-down, yet collaborative environment such as Arizona State University (population 68,000 +) as faculty, staff and naysayers shifted gears to experiment with and then embrace social media.
• It was a tough year. I travelled to Sri Lanka for a final goodbye to my dear sister, and experienced how the real power of community works minus Facebook and Tweetdeck.
• It was a landmark year, when took the bold –some say much belated– step of hanging out my own shingle with Public Radius.
• It was a  year of experimentation. I’ve recorded conversations with people in coffee shops, interviewed others via Skype, done a series of ‘Twinterviews,’ and even conducted a video conference for the State Department. While at ASU, I got into podcasting (covered topics such as the outbreak of swine flu), helped organizations and individuals start blogging for a variety of reasons –from job seeking to external communications.

So as we close out on 2009, I plan to condense the four things that I have learned. The starting Monday, I will cover them:

Collaboration. Crowd-sourcing. Content Curation. Community.

I hope they are valuable. Enjoy!