It's time for Simon Young to bid farewell for now. But before he goes, here is a brief look back on a year of ‘Right Brained Web’ blogs exploring everything from social media for the arts to the future of the internet.

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A growing business means I won't be able to blog regularly for The Big Idea, but as I bid farewell for now, it's time for a retrospective on 2010.

We met people! Sometimes the best way to know how social media works is to see what people are doing with it. In 2010 we met some of the frontline people using social media for the arts, including Vincent Heeringa of Tangible Media, Anna Connell of the Auckland Theatre Company, and playwright/producer Wade Jackson. We even went overseas and met Mark Titus, who is giving live sports entertainment a whole new meaning.

We learnt languages! (Well, one, anyway). Learning mandarin and visiting China yielded some amazing insights for any new experience - and life is constantly full of new experiences these days. Constant change is a new reality.

We read books! Michael Fields Swimming with Sharks gave us ideas about the economy, Equipped to Lead looked at the profitability of serving others, The Red Rubber Ball at Work brought creative ideas alive,  

We speculated! Two decades after the birth of the New Zealand internet, we wondered what the internet of the future might look like. We looked at the future of publishing.

We reinvented! Not the wheel, but organisations. We looked at what it means for an organisation to "be real" (and for an individual to be themself!). We looked at Ragtag Leadership (what's that? Click it and find out). We saw the importance of customer service in social media.

We examined what it means to be a successful communicator in the 21st century. Social media draws on many different skills and backgrounds. It's not entirely new, but it's a new combination. Practically, here's how to get a job in social media. That's because companies are starting to catch on to the new mindset.

On a "small picture" level, we looked at how to set up a social network for free, and how Facebook is changing the way we protest.

The Japanese farewell is "sayonara", which means we will never see each other again. I won't say that, I'll say "zai jian", the Chinese farewell, which literally means "see you again".

(Photo courtesy of The Advocacy Project)