The first time I heard the term “thought leader”, I thought, “Now there’s a cool concept: someone who is able to assert influence and change outcomes through the sheer force and power of her ideas.”

The last time I heard the term “thought leader”, I thought, “There ought to be a little anniversary present to mark the three millionth time you hear a buzzword.”

That may be my biggest complaint about buzzwords and jargon: not that they’re often impenetrable to outsiders, and not that they often mask a lack of clarity on the speaker’s part, but because they take perfectly good phrases – phrases with power, phrases with innovation and meaning – and suck the life out of them through overuse.

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Got a social media buzzword or catch phrase you’d like to lay to rest… or maybe reclaim and restore to life? (Say, “social media”, for instance?)

Happy Birthday!

By the way, this marks the first anniversary of Noise to Signal on Read Write Web. I’ve made a birthday cake but, uh, since you’re not here, well, I’ll just have to eat it myself. For the past year, I’ve been whipping up weekly cartoons, Richard has been gamely publishing them and you’ve been so kind as to read them.

Thanks for that. And thanks for every comment, Digg, tweet, stumble and Delicious-ifying. I hope that you’ll keep reading them in the year to come… and that you’ll enjoy them as much as I enjoy drawing them.

Ed: Thanks Rob, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the weekly funnies! It’s given RWW a sense of humor that sometimes we’re accused of not having (being serious types) Here’s to many more classic Rob Cottingham cartoons over the next year.

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