Fac­eRe­views: 13 Face­book 2008 Predictions.

Just launched: Red Room — where the writ­ers are. Quite the qual­ity list of authors — Jane Smi­ley, Nor­man Mailer, Dorothy Alli­son, Po Bron­son, Amy Tan, Alice Walker (above), Tobias Wolff — though it’s not clear how many of them have any­thing to do with the site at this early stage. Very impres­sive staff pedi­gree, includ­ing Ivory Madi­son and company.

Dan Gill­mor: Util­ity in Google’s Mobile Maps.

In Phoenix last week we used Google’s Mobile Maps on the Nokia N95 for a vari­ety of tasks, and found the appli­ca­tion to be a huge value. The soft­ware looks for the near­est mobile tower (or GPS loca­tion if you’ve turned on the GPS func­tion), and when you search for a type of busi­ness — we were look­ing, for exam­ple, for a fab­ric store — you get the near­est ones.

This is the clos­est thing to a killer app for the mobile that I’ve found yet. News orga­ni­za­tions are way, way behind the curve in meet­ing yet another local need.

Cyberjournalist.net: Cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism dom­i­nates online news in 2007.

From today’s San Jose Mer­cury News: A Q&A with the co-founder of busi­ness social net­work­ing site LinkedIn. 

Side­bar: Five ways to use Linkedin:

1. Increase your
pro­fes­sional vis­i­bil­ity by com­plet­ing your LinkedIn pro­file with your
past jobs, your edu­ca­tional back­ground, your affil­i­a­tions and your
activ­i­ties. It will help you con­nect with other people.

2. Improve
your Google list­ing by pro­mot­ing your Web site or blog on your LinkedIn
pro­file. When link­ing to your blog, include your name and a descrip­tion
of the blog.

3. Pre­pare for inter­views and meet­ings by look­ing on LinkedIn for the
per­son you plan to meet. Know­ing you have mutual friends or that she
rides horses can break the ice.

4. Con­duct busi­ness research by look­ing for peo­ple who work for the com­pany you are inter­ested in or for competitors.

5. Query your net­work by using LinkedIn Answers to send ques­tions to your list of contacts.

If you’ve arrived here from a search engine, welcome!

We hope you’ll return. In a list of the Top 100 sites cov­er­ing social net­work news, SocialMedia.biz was recently named the No. 1 site.

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I don’t believe I pointed to this before, so here’s a post by iFOCOS’s Andrew Nachi­son about Debate­pe­dia, a wiki alter­na­tive that eschews Wikipedia’s “neu­tral” point of view and takes as its mis­sion to act as the “Wikipedia of debate and deliberation.”

Oh, good gra­cious. The Huff­in­g­ton Post reports: Bill Kris­tol To Become New York Times Colum­nist In 2008.

Here’s a man who has cham­pi­oned a bank­rupt polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy — neo­con­ser­vatism — and who was the chief cheer­leader for the great­est for­eign pol­icy blun­der in U.S. his­tory, and his reward is a plum spot on the Times’ op-ed pages?

I can’t believe that the Times couldn’t have iden­ti­fied a more thought­ful and seri­ous colum­nist to espouse a con­ser­v­a­tive point of view.

In an arti­cle in Sunday’s NY Times, How to Lose Your Job on Your Own Times, Ran­dall Stross writes about the shift in dig­i­tal cul­ture when it comes to post­ings on social net­work­ing sites. Excerpt:

In the absence of strong pro­tec­tions for employ­ees, poorly cho­sen words
or even a sin­gle pho­to­graph posted online in one’s off-hours can have
career-altering con­se­quences. Stacy Sny­der, 25, who was a senior at
Millersville Uni­ver­sity in Millersville, Pa., offers an instruc­tive
exam­ple. Last year, she was dis­missed from the stu­dent teach­ing pro­gram
at a nearby high school and denied her teach­ing cre­den­tial after the
school staff came across her pho­to­graph on her MySpace
pro­file. She filed a law­suit in April this year in fed­eral court in
Philadel­phia con­tend­ing that her rights to free expres­sion under the
First Amend­ment had been vio­lated. No trial date has been set. …

Susan­nah Fox, asso­ciate direc­tor of the Pew project and an author of
both the 2000 and 2007 sur­veys, told me that she was sur­prised by the
reduced con­cern about online pub­li­ca­tion of per­sonal infor­ma­tion.
Inter­net users are not just pas­sively allow­ing per­sonal infor­ma­tion to
slip from their con­trol and end up online, where it is search­able; they
are also actively putting the infor­ma­tion online them­selves. The
“Dig­i­tal Foot­prints” study coined a new phrase, “active dig­i­tal
foot­print,” to refer to the per­sonal infor­ma­tion that indi­vid­u­als
increas­ingly place online voluntarily.

Inter­est­ing piece in Newsweek from ear­lier this month: Is pho­tog­ra­phy dead? Excerpt:

Pho­tog­ra­phy is finally escap­ing any depen­dence on what is in front of a
lens, but it comes at the price of its spe­cial claim on a viewer’s
atten­tion as “evi­dence” rooted in real­ity. As gallery mate­r­ial,
pho­tographs are now essen­tially no dif­fer­ent from paint­ings con­cocted
entirely from an artist’s imag­i­na­tion, except that they lack painting’s
man­ual touch and sur­face vari­a­tion. As the great mod­ern pho­tog­ra­pher
Lisette Model once said, “Pho­tog­ra­phy is the eas­i­est art, which per­haps
makes it the hard­est.” She had no idea how easy exotic effects would
get, and just how hard that would make it to cap­ture beauty and truth
in the same pho­to­graph. The next great photographers—if there are to be
any—will have to find a way to reclaim photography’s spe­cial link to
real­ity. And they’ll have to do it in a brand-new way.