San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle: 
As Wikipedia moves to S.F., founder Jimmy Wales dis­cusses planned changes and plans for expan­sion. The site, founded in 2001, now boasts 9.1 mil­lion arti­cles in 252 lan­guages, gen­er­at­ing 244.5 mil­lion monthly vis­i­tors, mak­ing it the the Web’s sixth largest web­site.  Ellen Lee has a Q&A with Wales.

Very sorry that I wasn’t able to attend Heather and Jimmy’s 50 Party Club in San Fran­cisco tonight. 

San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle: 12 of the 30 star­tups invited to this year’s World Eco­nomic Forum in Davos, Switzer­land, hail from Sil­i­con Val­ley. Not bad. Among them: AdMob, Mer­aki and the newly trans­planted Wiki­me­dia Foun­da­tion. I still hope to make it to Davos one of these years.

I had missed this from Larry Lessig ear­lier this month:

The good folks at Sun­light Foun­da­tion have build this cool lit­tle view­ing tool to let you see where the House “ear­marks” are. “Ear­mark­ing” as you likely know is the abil­ity of a mem­ber to tag funds for a “par­tic­u­lar use or owner.“
It will be a focus of my research. But long before I fig­ure out
any­thing inter­est­ing about this bizarre insti­tu­tion (a big assump­tion,
I real­ize), you can see the where and how of this if you’re will­ing to
let Google Earth be your viewer. Very cool.

Cover story in the cur­rent National Review (par­tial arti­cle): The Grim Truth.
Repub­li­cans face a calami­tous polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion; but they can act to avoid it.

At the Dai­lyKos, they’re lovin’ it.

The RSS feed reader Google Reader now makes rec­om­men­da­tions. If you use Google Reader, you’ll now see them at the top right. To my aston­ish­ment, the top three rec­om­men­da­tions were feeds by media and tech blog­gers whose feeds I thought I’d already sub­scribed to. Nice stuff.

Com­put­er­world: Study: Char­i­ties use social media more than busi­nesses. UMass research finds that large char­i­ties make strong use of blogs, online video and other Web 2.0 tools

Com­pas­sion in Pol­i­tics blog: Rev­o­lu­tion Now: Social media meets nonprofits.

NPR News Blog: Sug­gest a Ques­tion for the Demo­c­ra­tic Pres­i­den­tial Can­di­dates, in a debate Dec. 5 spon­sored by NPR and Iowa Pub­lic Radio.

Salon’s Machin­ist: Face­book: Shut down that privacy-invading ad program!

Friday’s NY Times: Face­book retreats on online tracking.

It’s the right — and the smart — thing for them to do.

Char­lene Li at Har­vard Busi­ness Review: Why Your Com­pany Needs To Be on Facebook.

Don’t write off social net­work­ing sites as merely social play­grounds
for the young. Your cus­tomers, prospects, and employ­ees are explor­ing
and extend­ing their rela­tion­ships there. Some of you will be bolder in
cre­at­ing busi­ness value in these net­works while oth­ers will wait for
the pio­neers to carve out the paths. But ignore these new com­mu­ni­ties
only if you believe your cus­tomers are not there – and there are few
instances where this will be the case.

Tom Dav­en­port at Har­vard Busi­ness Review: Why Face­book and MySpace Won’t Change the Workplace.

Saul Hansell in his NY Times blog: Google today is adding a fea­ture for some smart­phones that don’t have
built in GPS but can read the unique iden­ti­fy­ing num­ber of the cell
tower they are con­nected to. By using this infor­ma­tion, Google can
dis­play a map of the gen­eral area they are in.