The big event of the year was, of course, South by South West – The largest digital festival on the planet. Once again, a great set of British Businesses set off to Austin, Texas, on the Digital Mission, to network, learn and share. Many familiar faces in the opening minute of the video. Oh, and I got to see Fenech Solar, before then even released their first album. They are slightly massive now!

Yes, there’s a photo of me holding a snake in there. That was at Teen Tech – a brilliant event pulled together by Maggie Philbin, encouraging young folks to get involved in science and technology. Would love to see more businesses involved.

Then there’s Tom Watson (blog) and Cory Doctorow (blog) at the protest against the Digital Economy Bill (now act…) – that was an eye opening bit of parliamentary process at the end of the last government. And the Twestivals (I attened both Farnham and Reading this year) – and of course speaking at Digital Surrey.

Quite a few events at Gum Tree and eBay’s offices this year – thank you for supporting the community guys! Speaking of community, TVSMC has settled into a steady circular of events in the Thames Valley and beyond, with the wonderful Lloyd Davis (who also came ot SXSWi), and electric dress maker Debbie Davis dropping in.

All sorts of other things. Lots of speaking engagements (which I loved!), Gigs (great to have the bass out again), TEDx, RSA events. The two stand-out events of the year in the UK for me were Herb Kim’s Thinking Digital conference in the North East, and Scott and Drew’s Like Minds in Exeter. Two amazing, and very different, experiences.

Social Media in the Business space has gone from strength to strength. Speaking at Dell’s Social Media huddle event caused me to reflect on how much things have matured. Collecting not one, but two awards for Redcatco’s work with TheBlueBallRoom and DHL was a major highlight of the year. Meanwhile SocialOptic’s first service, Milestone Planner, has flourished, starting the year in Beta, and ending the year with customers across 3 continents, a phenomenal growth curve, and sharing the stage with Google, Microsoft and IBM. Not bad!

Here’s to 2011! Have a good one!

Measurement and efficiency were some of the themes for 2009, and I’m sure they will be for 2010. Through Homecamp I learnt about monitoring home power use, and with Redcatco we got even better at measuring things and making business cases.

In 2009 I experienced my first ever SXSWi, which meant heading to Austin, Texas, with Chinwag and the Digital Mission crew to meet with lots of new and familiar faces from the digital industry.

And I got to see a few bands while I was out there too, including The Webb sisters, for the second time in the year!

A fair amount of the year was taken up with psychology study – reading, experiments, write ups and an exam. Probably the highlight of all of that was attending the CAPP conference, hearing some very well grounded, but inspiring lectures, case studies and talks. I ended the year with a First in cognitive psychology, so it feels like the hard word paid off.

The summer was an eventful one. Although a lot happened in the spring, Redcatco social media work started to build up over the summer, and I seemed to be speaking and doing social reporting at more and more events. I even bumped into this chap…

There was still time for fun side projects, one of the most memorable was the Twitter Cook Off, watching a chef judge a set of sandwiches via Twitter, as you do, and listening to Caalie relay the results to Nicky and Maggie Philbin.

I was involved in quite a few NESTA
related events over the year, and also a couple of Reuters ones. The meant that I got to work with some bright, fun people, and chase political leaders around London. A very different perspective from the Cabinet Office events I helped with earlier in the year. This was also the year of the Digital Britain report.

The 1pound40 event at Reuters was one of the highlights of the year, although presenting at SMiB09, Online Information 09 and the Dell B2B Huddle was close to top of the list too.

The number of meet ups seemed to grow over the year, and I added to the mix by kicking off the Thames Valley Social Media Cafe, inspired by the model Lloyd Davis pioneered in The Tuttle Club. One of the evening highlights was the Cozytweetup that ended up with a candle lit picnic in St. James Park, before everyone was moved on, in a very friendly manner, by the police.

During the summer our eldest son managed to break his arm not once, but twice. Oh, and he burnt the other arm just for good measure!

VannFest was, as the previous year, the highlight of the summer. And for the record, I didn’t get a tatoo… Although did this photo of me ever cause a saga! I’m assuming it was the QR code on the T shirt ;).

VannFest wouldn’t be VannFest without a picture of some sky candles…

There were quite a few business trips during the year. Too many to mention, although the visit to Bonn, Germany sticks out in my memory. Amazing place:

Very oddly I appeared in a Vodafone advert in Germany, both on-line and in posters. You’ll have to look closely, but you’ll see me on the screen of the phone, next to Robert Scoble (remember what I said about those faces at that dinner!)

Over the course of the year my photography set up evolved, with some new cameras and lenses. I started to shoot some video – having been won over by the Canon 5D Mark II.

I squeezed in a photo walk or two, including a memorable afternoon with friend and Flickr super star photocillin.

And Canon let me try out some amazing gear, at just the right moments during the year, including the largest lens I’ve ever handled. The photo doesn’t do it justice – that’s a full size camera body on the lens in the picture there. It takes two hands to lift and gets comments everywhere – including during the Legoland fireworks, where more than one young lad said “I want one of those!”. Needless to say, it captures some amazing images.

Seeing real-time Time-Slice photography in action at the Canon Pro Solutions Exhibition was a definite peak camera-geek moment.

The expanding photography set up meant the chance to shoot some memorable pictures at various places around the planet, as well as Sara’s amazing body painting art.

I read lots of books, not just psychology ones, including reviewing quite a few, and featuring in some too.

Oh, and printed one of my own…

Back at home, the apple and pear trees and the vines were fruitful, the kids grew up some more and the recording studio remained sadly unused – something I hope to fix in 2010.

In the autumn I got to watch two of my favourite bassists play, at the same time! Michael Manring and Steve Lawson played together in London:

And I even managed to edit together this video for the bass guitar blog:

That wasn’t the only music in the year. Later in the autumn I went up to Birmingham and photographed and interviewed behind the scenes at the UB40 Live Loud and Local gig:

In November Kate showed quite how much interest a fox on the underground can create! By then I’d also set up SocialOptic with Jim, something which will be very much at the centre of 2010. With November on the scene, I dived in and took part in Movember – growing a moustache to raise awareness of men’s health issues, including prostate cancer. It opened my eyes to a few things I will write a lot more about in 2010.

To round out the year, snow arrived. Followed by more snow, and lots of it! The roads were chaos, so I holed up in the home office and click-clacked away to close of projects, ready for a clean start to 2010.

As the snow subsided, visitors arrived, and finally the family managed to squeeze in a break down to the west country.

Including a morning on the beach in Devon, before heading home for the New Year…

When: Thursday 9th April, 10:30am.

Where: Good Taste Coffee, 67 High St, Camberley, England, GU15 3RB

(awaiting review on Trusted Places and Yelp,  WiFi mentioned on jiwire.

Why: Just Because… Business conversations and coffee.

Who: At least me (Benjamin Ellis), Paul Sloane and Andrew Gerrard.

Getting there: Camberley town centre is all shiny new. You can park in one of the two official car parks, or there is free 2 hour parking on Gordon road – a bit of a walk and across the railway line.

If you are interested in coming along, please DM or @ me: twitter.com/benjaminellis or add a comment here (so I can be prepared if it turns into a twitter mob!).

Even if you are a design neanderthal like me, you will recognise the work and its brilliance. There is a big difference between solving a problem (engineering) and solving it elegantly (design). So much to learn…

The How to write a speech in 5 minutes on the WOWNDADI blog was read over 10,000 times in just a couple of weeks. The house had 12 people living in it for most of the week, which added to the general excitement levels too.

Tomorrow (or rather today) I am off to Social Media Camp London… As usual, the flickr stream probably best show what I have been up to.

Wonderful as meeting absolutely everyone was, the highlight for me was seeing Ben (aka ihatemornings) singing his twitter song. “you’re no-one if you’re not on twitter“. Don’t worry, you are someone if you aren’t, but you’re missing out on meeting new people like this lot (my photos from the very dark night):

Yesterday morning saw me working form the Tuttle club, AKA London Social Media Cafe, hosted by Lloyd Davis. There were a lot of people on site and the clatter of keyboards was slightly drowned out by the chatter of conversation.

It was a very positive experience and set me off thinking on a number of threads. There were some great conversations – than you Thayer, David Terrar, Anne Marie McEwan, Joshua March, Francine Kizner, and others too. I was reminded how important the social nature of the office environment is, something that is missed working home-alone. The seed of ‘randomness’ that comes from interactive with other people is a key part of creativity. The unexpected and the different can be inspirational.

The Social Media Cafe provides an opportunity to meet like minded people, with different background and experience. I think it is a concept that would benefit anyone in the creative space, but also something that could be applied to the supposedly less creative businesses too…

It would be great to have places like this to drop in and work all over the country, if not all over the world. If you are in London and in the social media space, check it out: The Tuttle Club.

• The Transport for London web site – brilliant design and v.useful.
• The National Rail site – design not so good, but it functions.

Between the two I can usually work out which train to get into London, and when.