What's your #awesome09 news?

It would be an understatement to say that things have been a bit gloomy lately. Just today Bill Gates was in the news predicting that the current financial crisis would last another 4 years. The IMF are predicting that in 2009 we’ll see the lowest growth rate in the world economy for the last 60 years. Throw in the fact that many people have been made redundant, (I was one of the early ones last year) with more soon to follow, there really isn’t an awful lot to be cheerful about these days.

The general air of depression and trepidation that plagued the end of 2008 has followed us into 2009 and I want to try and do something about that. To explain my cunning plan I have to go back to January when I was chatting to Alfie about our recent news, all of which had been pretty awesome.

I was loving my new job in Doha, he was in the middle of some very cool projects at Moblog and we were both riffing about projects we’d love to work on this year. The word ‘Awesome’ came up quite often in our conversation, so  much so that by the end of it we had pledged that 2009 would be the Year of Awesomeness. Among all the doom and gloom coming from the media it was good to have a positive outlook again and naturally it made sense to spread the word.

So i did. On Twitter:

#awesome09 is born

And there the simple idea behind Awesome09 was born. Now more than ever people need to hear good news, something positive to connect with. So I am asking everyone to share all the Awesome that comes their way in 2009 with their communities. Anything that that has made you smile, that has given you hope, that inspired you or that you just thought was pretty damn cool. Share it all, the small Wins and the big ones.

I’ve got the ball rolling with the #awesome09 Hashtag on Twitter and this post will be tagged the same so that Technorati et al. will pick it up. If you’re an avid user of another community then please spread the news on there as well - “We’re going to make 2009 the year of Awesome”. Are you on board?