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.

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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.