For three months early this year, 63-year-old Ronald Lang was one of the most plugged-in patients in America. Lang, who suffers from congestive heart failure and multiple sclerosis, was pilot-testing the Intel (INTC) Health Guide, a device that let doctors monitor his health remotely. Each day after he woke up, he’d step on a scale and strap on a blood-pressure cuff that were attached to the Health Guide. The device collected his vitals and zapped them to his doctor’s office.

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Microsoft’s (MSFT) “Laptop Hunters” commercials have generated lots of Mac vs. Windows PC debate. Surely there can’t be enough, so I’d like to generate even more. Quite unexpectedly, I’m a PC.

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The experience of growing up online will profoundly shape the workplace expectations of “Generation F”–the Facebook Generation. At a minimum, they’ll expect the social environment of work to reflect the social context of the Web, rather than as is currently the case, a mid-20th-century Weberian bureaucracy.

If your company hopes to attract the most creative and energetic members of Gen F, it will need to understand these Internet-derived expectations, and then reinvent its management practices accordingly. Sure, it’s a buyer’s market for talent right now, but that won’t always be the case–and in the future, any company that lacks a vital core of Gen F employees will soon find itself stuck in the mud.

With that in mind, I compiled a list of 12 work-relevant characteristics of online life. These are the post-bureaucratic realities that tomorrow’s employees will use as yardsticks in determining whether your company is “with it” or “past it.” In assembling this short list, I haven’t tried to catalog every salient feature of the Web’s social milieu, only those that are most at odds with the legacy practices found in large companies.

1. All ideas compete on an equal footing.
On the Web, every idea has the chance to gain a following–or not, and no one has the power to kill off a subversive idea or squelch an embarrassing debate. Ideas gain traction based on their perceived merits, rather than on the political power of their sponsors.

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How was the first Republican CNN-YouTube debate? So exciting I fell asleep! I missed the last six questions and had to catch them in YouTube’s helpful playlist from the night. There’s also live-blogging coverage from the New York Times, ABC News and Mahalo.

There were no melting-snowman questions to trivialize Mitt Romney’s participation, but there was some goofiness, like this homemade candidate roundup ditty. As for content, CNN’s efforts to make sure the questions weren’t too left-leaning–a.k.a. “weed[ing] out the obvious sort of Democratic gotcha grenades”–meant that things like health care and climate change weren’t even mentioned.

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