It’s a face-off between new and traditional media at the Web 2.0 Summit.

Representing new media, in a discussion over the future of journalism, are Federated Media’s John Battelle; Marissa Mayer, who leads Google’s (GOOG) search services and consumer products like Chrome; and Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times (NYT), and The Wall Street Journal’s top editor, Robert Thomson, stand in for the old guard.

Aggregator sites like Huffington Post and online portals like Yahoo (YHOO) and Google have seen their readership, advertising revenue and influence increase. Meanwhile, traditional-media types have criticized these forces for unfairly leeching their reporting and hurting their business models. We’ll be alert for verbal sparring.

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The Army has ordered its network managers to give soldiers access to social media sites like Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter, Danger Room has learned. That move reverses a years-long trend of blocking the web 2.0 locales on military networks.

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Companies are scrambling to silence errant messages while exploiting social networks.

Zachary Weiner, the CEO of Chicago boutique ad agency Luxuryreach, has had quite a time in social networking land of late. Recent adventures include employees twittering about how demanding Weiner is, how hung over they feel, and how “totally not into” the client they are.

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“Controlling the stream” is not just one of the major life-challenges facing elderly gentlemen; it is the center of industrial competition on the realtime social network that we once termed “Web 2.0.” Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, gave a speech yesterday before a group of advertising executives in New York in which she argued, as the Wall Street Journal reported, that “banner and text ads are old news.”

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In his keynote speech at last week’s Web 2.0 Expo, Vic Gundotra, Google’s vice president of engineering, reaffirmed that the future of tech is all about mobile. He demonstrated a crowd-pleasing prototype for Gmail written as a Web application for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and Google’s (GOOG) Android platform, which would allow users to access cached messages without an Internet connection.

The wireless Internet “is emerging as a viable platform,” he told the audience. “I don’t think people realize what you can do in the mobile Web because of these powerful browsers. Imagine if you were able to build an app that ran across all these phones because of the Web.”

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Movie buffs are used to visiting RottenTomatoes.com for guidance on whether it will be a “Watchmen” or “Madea Goes to Jail” weekend. Will they tune in as the Web site tries its hand at television?

Tonight, Current, the Al Gore-founded cable station, will begin airing “The Rotten Tomatoes Show.” The half-hour episodes feature co-hosts Brett Ehrlich and Ellen Fox, who review film news and, in Web 2.0 style, draw from users for short (really short–DVD releases are reviewed in haiku form) reviews.

Jeff Plunkett, the show’s executive producer, says that Current approached the movie-review site with the idea of reinventing a genre that–all due respect to “Siskel & Ebert”–hasn’t drawn younger viewers in years.

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A discussion that began on a journalist’s personal blog has sparked a wider debate on ethics in the age of social media as the lines between journalists’ professional work and their personal activities blur. It began when Adam Tinworth, the head of blogging development for Reed Business International, criticised the National Union of Journalists on his blog for still not “getting” social media such as Facebook and Twitter, and for responding defensively to calls to include social media in their training.

In a follow-up post, Tinworth noted that an NUJ representative had visited his blog from an email with the subject “effing blogs” (http://bit.ly/blogs2). This turned into an unseemly spat when Chris Wheal, a freelance journalist and the head of the NUJ professional training committee, who had sent the email, criticised Tinworth for not contacting the union first for a comment before publishing his post. “Please consider the implications of your actions in future and follow basic journalistic standards and ethics before pressing the ‘publish’ button. Is that too much to ask of a journalist?” Wheal asked.

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Barack Obama’s online presence drove his campaign’s early fund raising and his primary victory over Hillary Rodham Clinton. His campaign’s use of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube proved that he was part of the Web 2.0 generation. In the run-up to November’s election, Senator Obama–or one of his staff members–typed more than 250 updates to his Twitter account at twitter.com/barackobama.

So what happened? President Obama hasn’t tweeted once since being sworn into office. He posts weekly five-minute videos at whitehouse.gov. Can’t the guy type a one-line update?

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Everyone knows how well Barack Obama’s presidential campaign made use of new media to raise money and market the candidate. We also know how big a role social technology played during inauguration week, from handheld flip HD footage appearing on network TV to people reporting on Twitter about what they liked and disliked. After President Obama took office, spirited debates proliferated in the blogosphere about whether or not whitehouse.gov is Web 2.0-enabled and what the role of President Obama’s CTO might be. But one striking trend has largely flown under the national radar: the rise of the goverati.

What is the goverati? It is made up of people with first-hand knowledge of how the government operates, who understand how to use social software to accomplish a variety of government missions, and who want to use that knowledge for the benefit of all.

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The year is nearly over, and anyone who has walked through the snow has had a moment to reflect on whether he has made the world a better place.

After three months of blood-letting-money-scrabbling-self-flagellation, few of us have the heart to ask that question aloud. Making the world better was once what every entrepreneur talked about at every opportunity. But now the Segway-riding idealists who ushered in Web 2.0 are in retreat, and the hard-nosed mercenaries are chasing after us.

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Saturday, Loïc Le Meur blogged that “We’re not equal on Twitter, as we’re not equal on blogs and on the Web.” He was talking about the need for Twitter to start filtering searches by authority–and by authority he means the number of people following them.

It’s laughable…the idea that someone has “authority” because a lot of people pay attention to it. Isn’t that the most anti-Web 2.0 thing you’ve ever heard? Did we forget about the long tail? Wasn’t that the whole point? Level playing field…hear the small voices…excuse me, is this thing on?

So, mark this date down. Dec. 27, 2008, is the day that the digerati jumped the shark–the day that a guy who raised $12 million for a video blog commenting platform with no revenues or any idea of what the business model would be told the world that he only wants to listen to Twitter users with a lot of followers.

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You’re sitting at the back of the room in a large auditorium. There is a guy up front, and he is having a conversation with the people in the front few rows. You can’t hear them quite so well, although it seems like you can tune into them if you listen carefully. But his voice is loud, clear and resonant. You have something to add to the conversation, and almost as soon as you think of it he looks right at you, and says thanks for the contribution… great idea. Then repeats it to the rest of the group. That is Asymmetrical Follow.

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The first time I saw a lolcat–those funny images of felines with grammatically questionable captions–it took me a minute to understand the joke.

“What’s with the misspellings?” I wrote the friend who’d IM’d me the link. “Cats are dumb and can’t spell?”

“Pretty much,” my friend replied.

“And they have bad grammar?” I wrote, still processing the idea.

“Yes,” he wrote. “Get it?”

I did. In fact, I couldn’t stop laughing.

By now, even the most casual observers of the Internet are aware that lolcats have become a certifiable Internet phenomenon. Their flagship site, Icanhascheezburger.com, is one of Web 2.0’s big success stories–on track to top a billion page views this year–and its content is entirely user-generated.

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There’s something about the crisp autumn air that brings out the philosopher in Mark Zuckerberg. At this week’s Web 2.0 Summit, the Facebook founder mused, according to Saul Hansell of the New York Times, “I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and [the] next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.”

Hansell dubs this Zuckerberg’s Law. But I believe it’s actually Zuckerberg’s Second Law. Zuckerberg’s First Law, enunciated on another fall day almost precisely one year ago, took this elemental form: “Once every hundred years media changes.”

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On Wednesday, about 1,000 of the tech industry’s elite will begin schmoozing at a three-day conference here on Web 2.0 technologies, in what is now a vastly different business climate than a year ago.

At the onset of the Wall Street meltdown, many in Silicon Valley seemed to have their heads in the sand. But in recent weeks, with lightening speed, venture capitalists are suddenly preaching to their portfolio companies to cut costs, generate revenues and become profitable, fast, or die. So it will be interesting to see if the Web 2.0 Summit, founded by Tim O’Reilly, the president of O’Reilly Media Inc., and John Battelle, chairman of Federated Media Publishing and a co-founder of Wired, will also inject more much needed realism without the incessant hype that is often found at these conferences.

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