We can all breathe a sigh of relief. The second week of January is here. Joy to the World. Rest easy at last.

It’s not that the financial scramble that was 2009 has tripped and tumbled to a close so much as it is that the endless, tedious reviews of the decade’s demise have finally grumbled to a halt.

From the moment a leaner, more accountable Santa Claus eased his way down the chimneys of the world, the daily literati have ploughed through the ten years prior like some taut, irritated obituary writer scratching for something nice to say. Day-upon-day of lingering nostalgia about this and that. Skeleton staff cobbling together their Wikipedia-based reviews of past political, social and technological upheavals whilst they wait for reinforcements who have the energy and appetite to start thinking about the future.

In the Southern Hemisphere, the lingering is more pronounced. It’s summer here and half of the work force is spending what remains of its stimulus packages at beachside cafes. But even they are not immune to the frustration of a lack of news. You can see them, lattéd to the hilt, pawing through their breakfast papers and handheld devices in search of something that is less pub-quiz and more future-tense. Little wonder that Kindle is on the rise.

The hiatus is unlikely to come to a close until well after Australia Day – a strategically positioned late-January national celebration that provides a nationwide mandate for extended leave. I remain convinced that part of the reason Australia skipped the recession was due to the fact that so few people cared about it. Why would they? They were, as their sun-bleached bumper stickers said, simply “Somewhere on the Australian Coast”.

It’s a fact that has made me a fully signed-up advocate of the Cliff Richard School of Economics too – a doctrine of fiscal management that rationalises the argument that no amount of economic meltdown can counter an equal and opposite force of all-out chirpiness. Squeeze into a camper van with the family 2 hours north of Sydney, sing “We’re All Going on a Summer Holiday”, and try not to be buoyant. It’s impossible.

So what does the next decade hold? Mores the point, what an earth is going to happen in the next 6 months? In my world, the communications and marketing world, the topic of endless debate and worry and hair-pulling and failed Eureka moments is digital. Still digital.

It’s remarkable when you think about it that all the brains in the world, all those bunkered down geniuses in the IT dens of Bangalore and Silicon Valley have yet to really – I mean really – come up with a clearly defined business model for online, community networking sites. We know their popularity. We know what they can do when it comes to shaping opinion. But do their owners – their proprietors – really know how they can make some money out of them? Sustainable business models are notable by their absence.

I’m far from the hub of intelligent digi-gurus who fret about this every day, so I’m the first to admit that my point of view lacks the technical prowess owned by many of my peers. But what is obvious is that the very popularity of sites such as Twitter is driven by the fact that its 60 million users own it. They have communitised it and that makes it all the more difficult for the founders to commercialise it. It’s purity in socialism. A Lord of the Flies environment in which the slightest whiff of counter culture would see an already fragile house of cards come tumbling down as quick as you could type 140 characters.

Last year, Biz Stone and Evan Williams, founders of Twitter, rejected a $135m takeover bid from Facebook. You have to assume they therefore have something in mind. But quite what, it’s difficult to see. To a fashion, Twitter’s charm has always been its nimbleness and spontaneity. It attracted a huge following and celebrities leapt at the chance to share the irrelevancy of their life and their point of view. But it has a split personality. Rather like its users.

For many, celebrity or otherwise, Twitter became a free source of counselling; for others, an ego stroking loveathon; and, increasingly, a roadmap to relevant sources of data that they may otherwise have been missed. Despite the recent and well-publicised departure of some of its more well versed contributors (RIP Stephen Fry) somewhere in all of that, lies the answer. Whether Twitter can ride the tide of enthusiasm until a new wave comes through is debatable. But I think the answer is, probably, yes.

Google’s recent launch of the Nexus One phone as its first proper foray into hardware is one way forward. But such an initiative would require a huge capital injection for its many wannabees to pull it off – and a far more sustainable, understandable brand than a business like Twitter currently has in place.

Following the standard search engine model of referring people to other websites is the other obvious route. Whilst there’s a sense that the boat has already sailed on that one, there remains plenty of opportunity for sites to service niche markets (just ask Apple if niche can be profitable). But it’s limited. So we keep searching.

The business model that, in my humble opinion, shows the greatest potential in 2010 is the very same one that the music industry has been getting to grips with for the past 5 years. It’s the one on which brand associations make the real money; where product and merchandising flies off the shelves, regardless of the dwindling sales of CDs; the one in which a cool t-shirt will garner twice as much cash for the band than the music they create.

For Twitter and others that means punching through the ambiguity about what they might become, or for that matter even stand for, and creating a brand that has substance and meaning. A brand that has its own DNA and is something that connects with people’s own values. Marketing gobbledygook? Maybe. But think of any product you may covet and your ferret is often tickled as much by what that brand stands for rather than what the product actually does. Anything else makes it a commodity and commodities are boring. Particularly digital commodities.

Where this will all end up, I’m grappling with as much as the next man in the marketing street. Digital is swift-esk in its trajectory, moving so fast that its twists and turns and endless deviations make it all but impossible to catch. So, for now, I’m scouring the online forums and media pages and intelligent platforms of commentary for some insight into where the likes of Twitter might be going.

Half way into January, there should soon be a lot more in the way of forward thinking rather than Once Upon a Timing. I do hope so. It’s only 4 weeks to Chinese New Year, after all.

I was seventeen years old. My first innings for the school’s 1st XI cricket team and it could not have been a more Bigglesk moment.

Late on a warm summer’s afternoon, skylarks wheeling across a deep blue sky, three runs required, yours truly at the crease, last man standing. There may have only been a cluster of boys, parents and masters gathered around the ground, but on what was a perfect English June day, the gallery crackled with excitement. This was the moment when the school could, perhaps, finally bury the hatchet against its oldest rival. It was deathly still.

The bowler stumbled towards me, wet hair flailing behind him, white shirt untucked and flapping in the breeze, arm cocked to release another medium ball down a line that he’d been struggling with all afternoon. I had three options. Three, simple choices: let it pass me by and shake hands for a gentlemanly draw; tap it back into the open field with a over-exaggerated stance of quality and poise; or drive it through the startling open covers to my right for four runs and a victory of insurmountable glory.

I lifted my bat in controlled aggression and he released the ball with a little more pace than usual. Even then, I was still mulling over my options. Pass, tap or drive. Simple. Draw, draw, or win. And it was at that very moment that something equally unfettered, but completely unannounced, popped into my head. Something I’d managed to contain all afternoon.

“Hit the thing,” it said to me. “Hit the living crap out of that ball. Smash it right over his head for six and only stop swinging when you hear the tinkling of glass in the distance.” And so it was. A moment of staggeringly ill-considered judgement that saw me take one almighty step down the wicket and launch myself at the battered piece of red leather swinging my way.

The sound of two bails and three wickets being splayed around the field was only marginally quieter than the whoops and screams of a delirious opposition. Victory was theirs. Victory for the 7th year in a row. As they crumpled into each other’s arms, and my own team members ambled back to the changing rooms in desolate gloom, I discovered that there was in fact a more lonely place on this earth than the Gobi Desert.

It took a moment for it all the sink in. Standing alone in the middle of a cricket pitch; wooden bat in limp hand; padded for gladiatorial endeavour; boots like stone. And in some respects, 25 years later, it has still not quite sunk in. A point in time when, if I had one chance to go back again, it would be to that very moment when I lifted my bat in preparation for the incoming delivery. When I had three options and went for the fourth.

But doing or saying the wrong thing at the wrong time is rarely a unique event in the course of a lifetime. A reality I reminded myself of earlier this week, when in Tokyo.

Comfortable with the fact that I had a Saturday to myself, squeezed between business commitments the previous three days and a pending week of cultural collision in Seoul, I was perhaps a little too eager to leap into the day. Dare I say it, I was excited. So breakfast done, coat wrapped against the cold, I stepped out of my room and waited by one of four lift doors. A gentle ‘bong’ announced the arrival of Lift Two and as the doors opened I stepped into Stanley Kubrick’s furtive mind.

Eleven women of varying ages were squeezed into that small, cramped space, each with a face dusted pure white and lips of glorious red, hair coiffed and tucked. Silks of the most vibrant colour, embroided and starched with exquisite detail. One woman stood alone at centre, facing me square, dressed from head to toe in white. Angelic. She held a simple but beautifully structured bouquet of flowers. Her head was slightly dipped, eyes staring blankly ahead.

Of course, I should have stepped back and waited for any of the other three lifts. But I didn’t. I went for option four. I stepped right in, pressed close to the woman and waited for the doors to close behind me. No one said a word. No one, except me.

It’s a very British thing to feel the need to fill silences. You can see it at any dinner table across the land. That awkward moment when no one says a thing and all you hear is the clink of cutlery on porcelain. I put it down to a diet of Terry and June shows and Peter Sellers movies. What ever the reason, it has resulted in a very British cultural anomaly called the “conversation filler” – the point at which the mere hint of downturn in chit-chat results in someone trumping up with the most irrelevant and inane observation about something of little interest to anyone. Or, worse, a lame joke. At British dinner parties, it’s usually the hostess.

In the Tokyo lift passing through the 24th floor on a quiet Saturday morning, it was me.

In a place of otherwise tailored serenity, sweet scent and poise, Option Four manifested in all its ghastly glory. I blame chemistry, of course. It’s the only justification I have for a mind of jumbled of words firing an oral fusion that ignited a stream of garbled annunciations into a single, vocal sentence of inconceivable puerility.

“Wow,” I said with upbeat, ice-breaking vigour. “It’s like stepping in to a cupboard with a giant Christmas cake.”

The dark eyes of the bride-to-be lifted gently from the floor and fixed their gaze firmly on me, if only for a moment. My stomach disappeared into my shoes. I was back on the cricket pitch of my youth again. Alone in a Gobi desert of rich colour and quiet composure.

I had yet to exhale when the doors slid open to the lobby behind me. Two neatly groomed hotel staff held clasped hands around the sliding panels and bowed deeply at the bride. But she held firm. And in a moment of extraordinary clarity and control, turned to me gently and simply whispered in a crisp English accent, “Merry Christmas”.

And then she was gone.

The good thing about waking up, according to Keith Richards, is that you actually wake up at all. For those of us who are less impressed with by our instinctive diurnal desires, mornings tend to be a moment filled with the familiar. Same light. Same noise. Same bed. Usually.

But this morning I’d bet my LV incased Stratocaster that most Sydneysiders would have felt an eerie sense of dread before they peeled back the curtains. The light was unnervingly different and the morning shadows just a little more sinister. When they did, they would have seen little but a deep orange fog shrouding everything in view. There was no sun. No cloud. And not much else beyond 30ft. The air felt heavy. Strangely, there was very little noise. The world had gone quiet.

It was confronting. News stations repeated warnings for the young and infirm to stay indoors; ferry services were stopped (presumably they’re little use in tomato soup); trains slowed; traffic accidents sky-rocketed; and the air choked those who dared to make the dash between house and car.

10,000 miles away, at the very moment Sydney was waking up, the world’s leaders were waving fond farewells in New York at the close of a relatively fruitless effort by the UN to get the climate change agenda back on track. It was difficult to miss the poignancy of the news from New York whilst eating cornflakes in the middle of an orange mist.

Of course, it would be a very long bow to connect Sydney’s dramatic weather conditions with failed policy on climate change – although some may disagree. But what struck me most about the inter-relationship between the news and what was going on outside my front door was this.

The biggest challenge facing those who demand action on climate change policy, is that their evidence is based on history and the statistical likelihood of the polar ice-caps melting. That might be appealing to historians and statisticians, but it does like to stimulate the senses of the masses. How many of us, after all, vent our rage at the apparent inaction of political leaders as we potter through the back streets of our respective cities, alone in our cars, with little more than a Fair Trade coffee to quench our thirst and our morality.

Choking on red dust is a little different. It gives you a taste of what the impact of climate change could be like for generations to come. It is literal; it is tangible; and it is, without wanting to overstate the point, the power of the experience.

Which leads me to think that activation of the masses is far more likely when the future is presented to them through a sensory experience. I’ve yet to see this anywhere – probably because it’s not the easiest thing to do. An Inconvenient Truth, for all it’s success, was based on conjecture and threat. But, from the quality and impact of what I see come out of some our the offices in the support of product and service experience, I can not believe that someone does not have the capacity and where-with-all to create “future pods” – a place where the future becomes a reality; a place where the real impact of climate change can be seen.

Such an initiative has the distinct challenge of treading a fine line between future fact and science fiction. It also presents the possibility of arrest and incarceration if taken to its ‘enth degree. But it is not without merit.

Five hours after the orange fog lifted, things are getting back to normal. The ferries are running again, the motorways have freed-up; the sky is blue; and the ocean is back to its crystal green again. And whilst the view may be idyllic once more, I still have the taste of a scary future in my throat and it won’t go away.

Our digital radio at home, so the instruction manual tells me, gives us access to live broadcasts from more than 10,000 radio stations around the world. Whilst I’ll leave it to the consumer watchdog extremists to test such a claim, I have no reason to doubt its statistical validity. If you’ve ever tried to find a decent tune whilst dialling up your radio anywhere within a five-mile radius of Manhattan, you’ll know that ten thousand accessible radio stations globally is probably on the low side.

Of course the first thing you do once you’ve plugged this natty device in, is go straight to the country index in a bid to find the most obscure place in the world. Burundi caught my fancy and, after a 20 second connection time, I was hooked into the lyrical majesty of a bit of local hip-hop. Azerbaijan, a half dozen country tags before it, didn’t fare quite so well.

But all that soon changed as one story grabbed my attention and the little black duke box on the kitchen bench has since been permanently tuned into one programme and one programme alone – BBC Radio Four.

Apart from ensuring my young children’s’ adoption of the slack, Australian drone is marginally delayed (although a mix of John Humphries and Bob the Builder has ended up giving them some kind of Lancashire thump to their current tongue), it also ensures I remain connected with an international (read BBC) perspective on world events. Right now the most important political story (barring Pakistan and Sri Lanka), is the Telegraph’s expose of UK MPs making a mockery out of the parliamentary expense claim system. It’s more riveting than the Archers. Alas, it’s far more depressing too.

Flying up to London with British Airways this morning, I had a chance to paw over the details as published by the UK paper. This is clearly far more than another absurd and frustrating abuse of power. This could be crushing. If it not for the fact that the Telegraph had done the right thing and published details of extravagant claims from both sides of the House, the Labour Party may well have been dragged back to the Kinnock Ages post haste. The fact that so many had their nose in the trough has simply crushed any hope of building mid-term public trust and confidence in political leadership.

It could not have come at a worse time too. Here is a government that has spent the past year fighting on three major fronts: fiercely defending the merits of democracy; desperately performing triage on the remnants of Thatcher’s’ privatisation model of capitalism; and publically parading the ‘fat cats’ of business as the followers of the Marquis de Sade. That battle plan is now in tatters.

System failure or exploitative greed, British politicians are being accused of hypocracy at one end of the spectrum and criminal intent at the other. The truth has almost become an irrelevance. The single biggest difference between a British politician exploiting the system and, say, Bernie Madoff doing the same is that the one was voted into power, the other built his power base on the principles that that power supported. Neither is justified and both smack of greed, regardless of the motive.

More important still is the fact that the government had charted it’s path out of the economic gloom with the promise of greater transparency, strong commercial principles and the warm and fuzzy sentiment that now that everyone’s had their fingers burnt, the future will be so much more honest and harmonious.

If this chart was drawn up on the back of a minister’s expense claim, it could not be worth less. Past actions are not the issue here. Instead we are reminded (again) that if there is opportunity to garner unfair advantage at others expense, far too many will do what’s possible rather than search for the moral fortitude to do what’s right. As the backdrop to future economic recovery, it’s a pretty troubling reality.

Business management is never easy at the best of times. And right now we’re in of the worst of times or, worse still, the end of the beginning of the worst of times. A fear of the unknown is consuming so many companies and organisations that management teams are simply tripping over themselves in a bid to stay upright.

No business sector is hurting more than the retail space. Which is why it’s the last place you’d look for counsel on how to deal with the macroeconomics of commercial survival. But step off the high street and find your way to a favourite hide-away store and there’s plenty to see and learn. Shop-keeping is the MBA, stripped bare.

Shop-keepers, that is the best shop-keepers, keep it simple. Which means everything they do gravitates around three things: Product; Passion; and Service.

Think about that for a moment. As a modus operandi it is as applicable to selling paper as it is to selling insurance. It doesn’t discount innovation. Nor does it ignore diversification. It does stick firmly to the principles of knowing what the buyer wants, having it in stock, knowing everything there is to know about it and making the customer feel like your shop is their second home.

The word on the lips of many in the public relations and communications industry is ‘survival’. Who’ll fall first? The boutique or the behemoth? Well, in the spirit of ambiguity, it could be neither or it could be both. Because size or speciality are rarely the driving force behind agency success. Product, passion and service are.

In many respects, the biggest frustration about these economic times is that they shroud the extraordinary and tumultuous change through which the communications industry is going. In the US, forecasters are predicting that in the next four years paid for advertising will fall by 70%, whilst spend on content development will quadruple. That puts every communications discipline on a collision course, ensuring he with the best idea and the best execution comes out on top. The democratisation of communication is coming your way.

But even then – even if we see such a fundamental change in the communications landscape – product, passion and service will still define the winners and the losers of our industry. They are the bedrock of commerce, good times or bad. And that means that those in our industry who are searching for inspiration through the pages of marked down management books, would do well to put down their reading material and talk to the book shop owner instead.

PRs are quick to defend their position as credible, valued counsellors and nine point nine times out of ten they are absolutely justified in doing so. Public relations is an immensely powerful communications tool when used properly.

Problem is, there’s always a lowest common denominator. This morning, I received this from King World Wide Communications.

‘MUSIC MOGUL SISTER HAS HOMECOMING WITH FAMILY AND FRIENDS AFTER BEING SHOT IN LOS ANGELES
Famous Los Angeles Hip Hop Mogul ”The Games” sister Sherani Taylor aka ”BFLY” will speakout for the first time after violently being shot. She was recently released from the hospital and will be treated to a family and friends homecoming on Wed. February 4, 2008 – 11am at Roscoes House of Chicken and Waffles located at 5006 West Pico Blvd. in Los Angeles.

KING WORLD WIDE COMMUNICATIONS

contact Todd Scott 516-312-6573

This was such an utterly appalling release that I had no moral choice but to call Todd to ask him why I received this note. I was particularly keen to find out two things. Firstly how and why he expected me, in Sydney, to rock up to Roscoes House of Chicken and Waffles in Los Angeles to hook up with BFLY and check out her bullet wounds. And secondly, how bad being ‘violently shot’, as opposed to just being shot, actually was.

To his credit Todd was enormously apologetic, blaming the fact that he had ‘borrowed’ a friends media list. The ‘violently shot’ bit was beyond him. It was about then that I lost the will to live. So I encouraged Todd to look up the word ‘targeted’ in the dictionary – something he instantly confused with his hip-hop client’s use of the term – and I left him to it.

You can only hope that the Recession has its benefits.

It’s taken all of a week perched on the eastern tip of the Australian coastline to realise that a decent holiday has little to do with location and everything to do with connectivity – or, to be precise, the lack of it.

With a small house, a beach at the end of the lane, two sandy-fingered children and no Internet access, my laptop was always destined to become a heavy-weight quill whist my Blackberry keyboard simply spent its time crunching away like a packet of crisps before finally giving up the ghost on day two. Having dusted myself off from a mild state of e-d-tox I began to relish my new found state of obscurity and settled down for a life that felt a little like the Waltons sur meare. The family was very impressed. I’m not sure the office felt the same.

Top of my relaxation list was to reacquaint myself with the age-old art of reading the daily newspaper from cover to cover. I shouldn’t have bothered. As one of the world’s most time-zone challenged countries, Australia gets much of its news 24 hours late. Not even events of global magnitude can find a way around that. The Tuesday Obama inauguration story was run in full on Thursday morning. Reading about it was a bit like plonking yourself down on a windswept beach only to be told that yesterday’s weather was simply glorious.

And what wasn’t redundant by time-zone, was redundant by content. The news from corporate Australia was grim. Forget those who tell you its better to sit out a business recession in the sunshine – gloomy news is gloomy news regardless of how sparkly the warm waters of the Australian coastline look.

And so my intellectual and educational default came from an increasingly battered copy of the weekend broadsheet – a publication so large, the children were able to make a tent, campsite, small fire and mock-up surrounding forest from it without me really noticing. What made it such a natural reference point was that it was a thousand pages of opinion and very little news. Which made for interesting reading indeed.

Since Mr Morse first started finger-tapping, media moguls have long realised that to be news, news has to be new. Facts have a habit of changing over short periods of time which is why being told something that is already out of date tends to niggle those who care. And most care.

Fast-forward to 2009 and the current crop of digital advocates continue to predict the death of the newspaper. Of course you only need look at decreasing advertising revenues to see that they have a point. But, for my money, it’s a false economy to assume print is on its last legs. Particularly weekend print.

Online forums may be the digital version of the opinion piece but I’m not entirely convinced such content is as accessible as your blogger on the Clapham Digibus would suggest. Fighting through the Sunday Cornflakes and spilt milk to boot up, search for the right web page, scroll to the appropriate article and expect the children to simply ignore me tapping away on the laptop is a nonsense. It would be red-rag chaos. Try the same process on the beach, and said laptop would soon be sized up as a spade. In the garden, the page would be invisible. In the bath, I’d be moments from death. etc etc. You get the point.

Not withstanding any future technical limitations what that probably means is that online will increasingly dominate the delivery of 24/7 news; TVs and radio will become PCs, albeit in the format of a familiar looking box so as not to offend the easily offended; specialist publications will run side by side with online user groups, each meeting the very particular needs of niche audiences; and weekend newspapers, brimming with a point of view, will flourish.

For the smart content provider that means having a toe in every camp and connecting them all through a single, trusted brand. ‘Monocle’ is a case in point: monthly magazine; live, weekly website broadcast; 24/7 web presence; retail outlet for branded goods; and linked column in the Weekend FT. All intelligent, connected opinion that stays consistent on content and provides its audience with access through a suite of channels that acknowledges the difference in audience access preference.

And so after a week on a beach with a young family and little connection with the modern world, I’m putting my ill-researched neck out and stating that the well formatted weekend newspaper is here to stay. That’s because opinion – well thought out and considered opinion – doesn’t really date over the course of a week. It matures, provokes debate and encourages a different point of view. It wallows in its analysis and if, quite frankly, that’s not enough to convince you the fact that it makes a great two-man tent must surely swing the vote in its favour.

For reasons superfluous to warrant explanation, I found myself strapped into the right hand seat of a remarkable slice of automotive genius early yesterday morning. And because I was in Sydney, rather than most of Europe or the US, that meant I had a steering wheel in front of me. Which made the experience all the more buttock tightening.

If you’re not a petrol head, which I’m not, the letter and number sequence, LP 560-4, will mean little to you. If, however, you know a thing or two about cars you will likely have goose bumps before you get to the end of this sentence. See.

The LP 560-4 is Italy’s contribution to contemporary art. If that sounds incongruous, it shouldn’t. Bolted onto the back of this particularly exquisite masterpiece is an engine with lots of impressive statistics, a four-wheel drive system that makes the stability of a mountain goat pale and more technical acronyms than our IT department would use in a week. But surrounding all of that is the most beautifully sculpted piece of pearl black carbon fibre you could possibly imagine – a crisp section of granite rock, nurtured into the form of a searing arrow by a man whose tool kit must have been comprised of silk, oil and feathers.

It is because of its form, not its purpose, that this car has so little to do with travelling from A to B. I defy anyone to walk up to it, open the door and slide into its seat. You don’t do that. It would be like giving the Pope a high-5. You walk around it. Slowly and with reverence. And you open the door with fingertip precision. For something that is apparently built around the principles of nuclear fission, this car is humbling before anything happens. It is reassuringly still.

Inside the cockpit (apparently, that’s what they call it) all is calm. There are two seats, a steering wheel and some foot peddles. All good so far. But underneath the discreet navigation screen to the left of the driver sit eight buttons, forged out of steel, in a neat single row. Two of them, when pressed in the right sequence, initiate something called thrust control. Another, slotted neatly next to the spot where you’d expect a gear stick to be says, CORSO. I refused to touch any of them.

Behind the steering wheel are two slim paddles. Neither activate the windscreen wipers or indicators. Both change gears. An important point when you’re about to turn left. Near your trembling right knee, tucked away in the dark folds of the leather dash, is a small round button that simply says, ‘Reverse’. Going backwards is discouraged.

So you get the picture. This is not your average motor. It’s not even your average Italian motor. This is something that demands eyes firmly fixed on the road ahead, no fumbling for the radio button when in motion and an absolute need to ignore the stirring sound track in the back of your head.

I drove the LP 560-4 for a full 60 minutes, through city streets and urban freeways, twisting roads and curling slip lanes. The sun was warming and the rush hour had yet to begin. It was mesmerising, exquisite, captivating and all the other incredibly over-used adjectives that you’d expect to hear. None of which do anything close to justice to the experience.

It is, instead, the closest thing you can get to controlled horizontal free-fall. The ultimate in forward projection in a very comfy seat (discounting anything with NASA stitched into the arm rest). It is an experience of contradiction too. Slo-mo and rapid-fire in a single moment. Detached from anything else on the road because it can make anything else disappear with the most delicate squeeze of the right foot. William Shatner would be impressed.

When the journey came to an end and I parked up, both the car and I breathed out. I felt liberated. I think she felt bored. I, the blushing schoolboy. She, the seasoned hooker. It was pathetically, gloriously rewarding and something that will stay with me for years to come. If I was religious, I’d move to Sant’Agata Bolgnese with immediate effect.

Of course, I am very well aware that this bloated, unpolished gush of autophilia goes against the very grain of this little blog of mine. And so, with purpose, I have since tried to find an analogy that neatly dovetails this experience into something, anything, justifiably communications or social trends related. But my best efforts have failed me. I simply can’t. And I’ve come to realise there’s little point in trying. So I’ll just say this.

If anyone, ever, gives you the opportunity to spend an hour in an LP 560-4, look them in the eye, take a deep breath and say, ‘Yes’. And if they don’t, find a (legal) way to make them. Good communications has its benefits.

Next week, Glass House services will return to normal. In the meantime, watch this.

It is blisteringly hot here in Sydney today. Scorched bare feet are causing millions to hop their way to the harbour foreshore in the New Year scramble for a vantage point to catch Sydney’s annual spectacle, the midnight firework extravaganza.

But despite perfect conditions for an evening of outdoor entertainment, there’s a hint of ‘last hurrah’ in the air. This is the first time in a generation when more people are reluctant to step into the new year than they are to stick about in the current. By all accounts, ‘Try to keep my job’ is currently topping the New Years Resolution list. You can hear the nerves rattling from Townsville in the north, all the way down the Australia’s eastern seaboard.

So, on the assumption that the more we know about the future, the less we have to fear it, here’s my top ten list of things to look forward to (or steer clear of) in 2009.

1. Integrity: those who have it will win. Those who don’t will die. Integrity in business will matter more this year than ever before. Smart, new companies will make a brand of it. And because most of us will end 2009 poorer than we started it, we’ll all be giving a lot more thought to deciding who deserves our hard earned cash.

2. Ingenuity: as companies big and small go to the wall, they’ll be a big appetite for new ideas and plenty of people who have the time to push their imagination. Look out for a business orientated R&D version of Facebook. If there are a million people willing to share pictures of their worst girlfriend on the net, there must be a million more looking for someone to spark some commercial inspiration.

3. Old Age: the older you are, the more popular you’ll be. With just about every industry you can think of having a reason to fear the worst in 2009, there’s one thing there’s not going to be a shortage of and that’s those with a bus pass. And it’s not just home help equipment manufacturers and medical device companies that are going to benefit. Because the majority of those in their sixties have just seen 50% of their live savings disappear down the credit-crunch plughole, the average age of our workforce is going to take a big jump up. That will impact everything from office politics to political office.

4. Infrastructure: on the day that Obama was elected, the Californian government quietly announced the introduction of a $100 million infrastructure package that will reinvigorate the use of rail travel in the state. Expect a fundamental shift in infrastructure and travel trends in 2009. When industry bailouts cost the taxpayer billions of dollars, a few hundred million all seems a bit of a drop in the ocean in the current climate. And whilst it will take a few years to come on stream, I’m predicting a resurgence in bicycle sales – both privately and to governments. The Parisian bicycle scheme, Velib, has proved such a success we should expect to see similar introductions in cities around the world. As for the general public, they’re saddling up will have little to do with the price of oil and everything to do with a greater sense of nostalgia when times are tough. Old style bicycles will make a come back.

5. Norway: two things will come out of Norway in 2009. Fiscal common sense and fresh, pragmatic design. The Finance Ministry’s ability to dodge the worst of the economic bullets is the envy of world leaders (with the exception of Gordon Brown who thinks he’s bullet proof). The generous applause is all about their stoic confidence and reserved air of absolute belief in getting the problem fixed. Norwegian pragmatism will be revered the world over. Brand Norway will also get a boost through the crisp styling and simplicity of its design students, bringing everything from clean lined furniture to svelte (which is not Norwegian for felt) clothing to our homes and wardrobes.

6. Celebrity: when the going gets tough, the tough start dreaming. And the American dream that one day the veil will come off the mundaneity of your every day life and you’ll be given a prime slot on the Letterman Show will be as buoyant as ever. As the recession bites, so the hopes of middle America that they’ll be blessed with some miraculous escape from financial oblivion will hit an all time high. Celebrity will be the biggest benefactor with those who’ve already hit the big time getting bigger and bigger. Paparazzi will go overboard. And national lotteries will have a boom year.

7. Quality: we’ll spend more on less. A craving for better things that last will pull the rug from under the feet of sectors of our disposable society and quality will be less dispensable. 2009 will be the year to start that carpentry business you’d always dreamed of.

8. Books: it’s also the year to write that book you’d always planned to write. With greater discretionary spending, we’ll be looking for maximum value for minimum cost. A book gives hours of entertainment at a relatively low cost. Having spent the past 5 years fretting over the power of the Internet, publishers could find themselves in for a bit of a boom time too if their product is right

9. Asia: the fact that the might of major Asian economies was still not enough to protect the rest of the world from the ravages of the economic downturn said little about their fragility and an awful lot about the depth and longevity of this crisis. But despite the slowdown, the majority of markets in Asia will remain on a growth curve, albeit less dramatic than expected by the Wall Street bulls 6 months ago. China will stay on track, Western confidence in India will slacken in the face of incremental tensions between it and Pakistan, and Vietnam and North Korea will emerge as the high-potentials of the emerging markets.

10. The Presidential Library: populating the G. W. Bush Presidential Library with suitable literature will be the year’s biggest online viral game. Searching for the right books that reflect the aptitude of the administration will give families across the US and beyond hours of fun, whilst offering the French the opportunity for political one-upmanship. Bush himself will retire to his new Dallas home followed everywhere by a unit of fearless security men, each especially trained in shoe-hostility manoeuvres. Look out for big sales of the Bush Boot in Australia – wind tunnel tested for greater accuracy when hurling at imposters.

Happy New Year!

Despite passing back into the hands of the Chinese in a fittingly symbolic ceremony that provoked a bout of public sobbing by Prince Charles, Hong Kong has continued to retain the air of an island of happy heterosexual capitalism amidst a becalmed sea of stoic, conservative socialism. But in the current economic climate, its bullish confidence is on the wane. You can see it in the posture of those who wander the Central district. They’ve stopped strutting. They pace, nervous and ill at ease.

It’s hardly surprising. The financial epicentre of Asia Pacific is smarting from the economic crisis like a punch drunk prizefighter unsure of where to swing next. Every day, The South Morning China Post reports of job losses with the solemn tone of national tragedy. A fortnight ago it was Citibank and HSBC. Next week it could be the journalists themselves.

These are strange times indeed. A couple of weeks ago I was in Hong Kong where (amongst other things) I attended the annual PR Awards extravaganza, an industry that is far from immune from the consequences of current market conditions. But in our particular world, the tension comes from an acute juxtaposition between the opportunity of a business revolution and the more immediate issue of commercial oblivion. The revolution is called digital adoption (rather than digital itself). Oblivion speaks for itself.

For a year or more now, some of the key players on Planet PR have been busy appointing digital gurus. These are the self-proclaimed experts whose remit is to wander, guru-like, across borders with a sublime confidence that stems from their ownership of a personalised lexicon of digi-terms and an apparent aversion to ties. Like your average GP, some are actually very good. Others are very good at confusing you.

Other firms understand that digital is in fact little more than another channel of communications, albeit an exciting one. Like the radio or the telephone or the television or the wireless or all the other communication devises that were amazing in their time, digital will contribute to the decision making journey. It won’t fundamentally change it. Which is why such firms are reluctant to guru-tise their digital offer and, instead, make it another thread to the increasing complex fabric of communications and advocacy creation into which they weave their efforts. Firms like mine.

The divide between digi-worship and channel-agnosticism was evident at the PRWeek Awards. New categories in which to celebrate online campaigns had been introduced and there was a hint of thou art sexier than I as the traditionalists looked on with the air of a veteran skier observing a snowboarder for the first time.

But of course there’s nothing particularly new about digital communication. Nor is this the time for those in the PR industry to be navel gazing about whose approach is better. It all matters now. In equal measure. It’s not about traditional or online communications. It is about inline communications. Getting, as one of my old bosses used to say, your proverbial ducks in a row.

Long the poorly dressed cousin to the curvaceous lust and powerhouse glamour that is (was) advertising, the PR industry has finally come of age. As client companies sniff out the means to maximise impact and exposure with a 30% budget reduction, PR firms are looking like a rather sexy alternative. It’s a surprise for some – a bit like the first time your best friend’s sister made you dribble rather than yawn. But it’s inevitable too.

The advent and adoption of digital has forced a rethink as to the influence and impact of those in the communications space. The public relations sector has as much claim on the outputs of the digital revolution as any other. It has forced the integration issue too, meaning the more progressive communications groups (to one of which, fortunately, I belong) have recognised that creativity is no longer king. The collective pursuit of evangelism is.

It is this industry reshuffle that has created a massive business opportunity for PR. Integrated or not, the PR sector has as good a reason to be at the forefront of the digital revolution as anyone else. If such PR firms are the vanguard of the revolution, then those that put creativity before advocacy will be the shocked troops of the bourgeoisie. Vive la révolution.