I love how Discount Tire let’s you do a free tire pressure check.

Makes me think of them as ‘helpful’ not ‘cheap.’

I’m never in agreement with those who write the obit for print.

But this week I received two magazines that give us reason to pause, and assess where we are headed.

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The first is an ad, obviously. It appeared in Process magazine. The other is IABC’s CW Magazine.

Full disclosure. I write a column for CW. In this issue I happen to talk about using quick response codes as a means of extending the conversation…beyond print.

I tend to agree with statements like this: “Actually print is where words go to live” – John Griffin, President of National Geographic’s magazine group.

Print lives in zones we never imagined. Two examples again:

• Take Scribd. Publishers such as New York Times and Simon & Schuster are part of this.
• Then take a look at Living Stories, a Google Labs project involving the New York Times and Washington Post.

Interesting isn’t it?

On to the second C I talk about: the wisdom of the crowds concept, and the belief that “the people formerly known as incompetent” can actually make great contributions.

I see this in organizations where everyone may not be a ‘communicator’ but there are many who can be Antennas, Filters or Connectors.

The best examples of crowd sourcing tend to be in journalism. Two great sites come to mind:

• Oh My News – the earliest citizen journalism site that began in South Korea.

• Spot.Us – a community-funded news site I came to discover this year and support.

However, in two other very different areas we see it in action:

• Google used our collective results for influenza related searches and came up with the Google Flu tracker.
• Starbucks tapped into its customer base with MyStarbiucksIdea

Bottom line: People will contribute their ideas and when they do it is up to someone in the organization to recognize it, map it, use it.

This is about the first of the 4Cs –the power (and the potential) to collaborate.

Like you, I occasionally come across people who find it hard to work in the same sand box.  But the good thing is these people and these instances are few and far between.

They are typically suspicious of newbies, protective of their work (or job description), or have an inflated opinion of their contribution to the big picture. (Someone down the road handed them the biggest crayon in the box, and they’re still holding onto it!)

But just looking around, we see plenty of examples and tools that enable collaboration. My favorite examples are how easy it is to work together on a document, via a wiki such as WetPaint, or a sharing tool such as Google docs.

Collaboration is much more than the ‘two heads are better than one’ concept, even though that’s at its core. It’s not something that only came about with the Facebook generation, either.

Two very different examples:

1. Butterflies:

I recall a project called Journey North that began somewhere in 2002. One of the collaborative projects involved students from Canada, the U.S. and Mexico collaborating on collecting data to track the journey of the Monarch butterfly. Some 300,000 students from 6,000 schools have taken part in this!

2. Media coverage

In 2008, for four days gunmen took over and terrorised hotels and other building sin the heart of Mumbai, India. Cell phone networks were overloaded, media were unable to get close to the shootings, and the bets reports were coming via text messages and via Twitter.

Within minutes, a journalism professor Sree Sreenivasan from Columbia University pulled together a radio show via a blog platform called BlogTalkRadio to cover the event using Mumbai-based media people, experts on Homeland Security and others.

So whether it is GoogleWave today, or BlogTalkRadio last year, we know that we all have the collaborative gene in us. The organizations we work for often urge us to be involved. In the past that has meant ‘anything but PR/marketing, corporate communications’ since they employed special people for that. Today, many employers –and government–realize that unless they tap into the collective brainpower through collaborative policies and tools, they could be left behind.

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!

Today I want to urge all communicators to take this very quick survey by Forrester. It’s an attempt to understand how social media is ‘penetrating’ the C-suite, and will impact us all in 2010.

Take survey here:

http://forrester.com/2010socialsurvey

When I talk to people about why video can be a powerful tool, it’s easy to oversimplify and talk about producing in-house vlogs. But if you look at the variations, you’ll see they could range from citizen journalism submissions, to ‘anonymous’ viral stories, to damaging claims, to pranks. Hers are three uses of video that can make or break a brand’s reputation.

These two will go down in the books as the best and worst of how video mined social media in 2009.

Samsung created this contrived piece for Smart Led technology:

Hewlett Packard, on the other hand is at the receiving end, responding to this direct, damaging claim about its facial tracking technology in its web cams

And speaking of being at the receiving end, here’s how another brand faced the music, so to speak. My all time favorite this year.

What are your most memorable videos for 2009? Share a link with my readers, and us why video matters.

Ask anyone who flies often about wireless access on a plane, and you get responses that include words such as ’spotty.’ ‘expensive,’ and ‘don’t even get me started…’

being someone who has put in a lot of international air miles, I always thought the airline business was one of those last areas to get bitten by the networking virus –social or otherwise. For the past decade we have seen carriers add it (Singapore Airlines did it 6 years ago), take it away, charge exorbitant fees for it, and generally make it difficult. Services such as Gogo Inflight (with a very slim list of partners) did not exactly get us all connected.

But I recently found out that Delta has been quietly rolling out its wi-fi onboard, and it’s got me all fired up. Delta has it on 325 planes –which accounts for “more than 1,200 flights a day”, says its blog.

My interest in wi-fi is more than just being able to connect to the outside world. I am interested in seeing how airlines make it possible for passengers to connect with each other, via a mini –ad-hoc even– social network. I know of someone who’s planning on taking this idea to a whole new level, but by his and other accounts, carriers are still not fired up. (The idea was also floated by Jeff Jarvis a year back, and Rohit Bhargava even before that but airlines are still differentiating around free meals or baggage fees.)

Oddly enough, airlines tend to approach networking with very narrow interests such as making it a branding exercise (getting us to fan them on Facebook), or a throwing it out as a perk (one more thing to pay for). Wi-fi is just one part of the equation.

Trapped in a tube, with limited movement, passengers who are allowed to connect with each other, or at least get to know each other a bit better, would have a direct bearing on brand loyalty, create offline networks, and start interesting conversations.

Think about it: these conversations won’t be limited to casual chit-chat at the gate. Just as how airlines allow us to pick our seat online, or print our boarding pass, they could automatically sign us up with a passenger network that works like LinkedIn, let us pick our business or special interest cluster. We could then contact flight mates prior to boarding, and find people who might be a few pixels away from what we do or plan to accomplish at our destination. Since we share one common element –the city we are flying out of or to- these connections could be valuable and create long-term interests.

Unlike hotels which tend to treat wi-fi as if it were Perrier, airlines can’t afford to miss this one.

“engagement zombies.”

William Paarlberg on creating a strategy for understanding lurkers in social media.

“I uploaded (Panic Attack!) on a Thursday and on Monday my inbox was totally full of e-mails from Hollywood studios”

Fede Alvarez who uploaded his short film”Ataque de Panico!” (Panic Attack!) featuring giant robots invading and destroying Montevideo. He was offered a $30 million contract to make a film.

“It’s not inconceivable that some creative hacker could use Twitter to get into a key business application at some juncture …The more Twitter focuses on the business market, the more it will have to focus on security.”

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet

“Fencing the internet is not going to help anybody”

Andrea Servida, deputy head of unit at the EUs Information Society and Media Directorate General, on the Chinese proposal to meter international web traffic.

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

The above line was sent via the Flickr site.