Max Gladwell

Celebrating the Max Gladwell New Year with a look back at MG00 and the 12 months that got us here.

Max Gladwell 00 will officially come to a close this evening at midnight (April 1st). Yes, indeed, tonight we celebrate New Year’s Eve and ring in the Max Gladwell New Year. We’ll bid farewell to MG00 and welcome MG01. Celebrations will take place at the Web 2.0 Expo and San Francisco Green Drinks, as well as in Los Angeles at BlobLive (doors open at 6:30 pm PT), the open-mic night for entrepreneurs that was just featured in the L.A. Times.

Feel free join the party via Twitter from wherever you happen to be, and don’t forget to use the #MG01 hashtag.

What is the Max Gladwell New Year, you ask? That’s a fair question.

The Max Gladwell domain name was registered on April 2nd, 2008. On that day our humble hero was born. Over the next 12 months, Max Gladwell would come to represent the nexus of social media and green living. It would further the principles of Environment 2.0, Entrepreneurship 2.0, Objectivism 2.0 and even Politics 2.0. Shaped by so many circumstances and events, Max Gladwell has now come to personify the heroic ideal of the networked social entrepreneur.

Those 12 months were also some of the most historic in, well, all of American history. So we decided that Max Gladwell deserved its own calendar. Because the lens through which Max Gladwell views the world depends on the unique timing of its birth and creation.

To wit, as the 2008 calendar year drew to a close in December, we considered writing a recap of the year and making predictions for the next. We gave it serious thought, but something didn’t feel right. We now realize it was because Max Gladwell lacked a full 12-month perspective. MG00 still had three months to go. Now that the debut year on the Max Gladwell calendar is just about history, we can offer that recap. The following are 10 of most important events, developments, and posts of MG00.

1. Barack Obama was elected and inaugurated as President of the United States. If it were any other election or any other candidate, our coverage could not have been justified. Obama marked a new era in politics and government, where social media is both essential and commonplace. We also offered our opinions on how Sarah Palin and the economy would affect the election at a time when those views weren’t quite as obvious as they might seem today.

2. We embraced Twitter and it hugged us back. We can’t stress enough the importance of using Twitter to build the Max Gladwell brand and gain early traction for our mission. While Twitter remains an important tool and continues to provide value in so many different ways, being active and engaged on Twitter at that time–at a time when Twitter was populated mostly by influencers and fellow bloggers–enabled Max Gladwell to gain key exposure. We ran a series called Tweets of the Week. In Part XVI, we said, “We believe that Twitter will be bigger than Facebook. We believe that if the social web melts down and we’re left with the one tool that everyone can actually use, Twitter will be it.” We also produced a screencast on how to use Twitter for the green blog giant TreeHugger, which has since embraced the Twitter #greenstream.

3. As the final nails are being hammered into the coffins of the Big Three automakers and bankruptcy for two seems imminent, we look back at an August 2008 post about GM in which we ask, “Will GM revamp its entire product line to more fuel-efficient models? Will the line include viable alternatives to petroleum and internal combustion? Can all of this happen before GM either runs out of cash or gets acquired by the Chinese?” We go on to detail the tragic mistakes made by GM management with regard to hybrid-electric technology and efficiency standards. Those are precisely the reasons why Obama just showed GM CEO Rick Wagoner the door.

4. Water emerged as a major social and environmental issue, earning a position alongside global warming, wildlife, and forests as an A-list cause. However, the term Global Parching has yet to become one of the great water clichés.

5. The price of oil hit a record high (or thereabouts) of $145 and then proceeded to fall at a record pace to well below $50. We observed gas prices in LA as high as $5.29 for self-serve, and we wrote a series on the green lining of high gas prices. We were incorrect, however, in believing that prices were driven purely by demand. There was clearly manipulation from trading. It’s just uncertain how much of a role it played.

6. Social media went mainstream. Our presentation at the Opportunity Green conference includes the Forrester data that shows adoption rates crossing a key threshold. Our conclusion is that Web 2.0 has lead to Risk Management 2.0, Product Development 2.0, and Transparency 2.0. Social media can impact an organization at every level, both positively and negatively, and its up to the leaders of those organizations to embrace and/or manage social media accordingly.

7. We’ve been a recession throughout the entirety of MG00 and experienced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. It’s worth noting that we started blogging about that crisis in July and early September.

8. Microsoft didn’t buy Yahoo!, nor did it buy Facebook. But Facebook established itself as the dominant player in social networking. We can’t recall the last time we logged into our MySpace account. And Facebook made an unsuccessful bid for Twitter.

9. The world made zero progress in addressing global warming.

10. Content solidified its place on the throne, driven by the the widespread ability to distribute content via social media coupled with the mass professionalization of content creation. This new media landscape has proven fatal for many newspapers, a trend that is certain to spill over into MG01.

Enjoy your New Year’s celebration. We’ll see you on the other side.

Photo Credit: Interestingly enough, this is a postcard from New Year’s circa 1900. It’s clearly been hacked for the Max Gladwell New Year.

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