Google is reprising its role as the official tracking engine for Santa's world tour this Christmas Eve. For the second year, the search giant is partnering with the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) to provide a real-time Google Maps updated with the location of Pere Noel as he makes his rounds at Noradsanta.org.

And, if you're really into it, Google's offering a 3D Santa tracker through Google Earth. Want it more personal? Drop the NORAD Tracks Santa widget to your iGoogle page. Or add the @noradsanta feed to your Twitter following.

Google starts the tracking at 6:00 am EST, Dec. 24. As of this writing, Santa was flying over Mt. Everest in Nepal.

Ho ho ho.

The bad news for ad sales: it's going to get worse before it gets better.

Barclays analyst Douglas Anmuth submitted the latest discouraging sign today with a revised forecast that anticipates ad revenue declining 10 percent next year, and rebounding slightly with a 1 percent increase in 2010.

Anmuth's latest is a darker picture than his October analysis, which had 2009 ad revenue dropping 5.5 percent.

In the online sector, Anmuth looks for 2009 revenue of $25.1 billion, accounting for 10 percent of overall spending. By that guideline, Internet ad revenue would post a 6 percent gain from the estimate for 2008, driven by a 4 percent increase in display spending and a 20 percent increase in search.

And who's in the best position to weather the storm? Who else -- Google. Anmuth names Google, Discovery and Omnicom as the three media stocks likely to outperform their peers in what could be a very solemn economic year.

Looking ahead to 2010, Anmuth expects online advertising to bounce back with 12 percent year-to-year growth and revenues totaling $28.1 billion.

Social media is a wonderful thing. Not a day goes by that I don't get a pitch from some eager startup trying to squeeze a little more juice out of the social Web, talking about how they can do it better -- more connected, more open, more social, and on and on.

Sadly, all that sharing has its price. We're familiar with the stories about employers digging through an applicant's MySpace and Facebook pages looking for the kind of character reference that you can't find on a resume. But what if the job you're in line for is the director of White House speechwriting?

Then it would probably be impolitic for you to be seen taking liberties with a life-size cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton, the president-elect's chief rival throughout the campaign whom he has now tapped as Secretary of State.

Such is the plight of Jon Favreau.

Favreau, 27, served as Obama's chief speechwriter throughout the campaign. So you can attribute to him much of the credit for the soaring oratory, supplying the words that Obama delivered so successfully in his rock-star campaign rallies.

But remember -- he's 27, and a great many people in Washington have done a great many worse things at a much older age. (For those of you who haven't seen it yet, here's Favreau getting cozy with cardboard Clinton at a party with one of his buddies.)

So the infraction is a twenty-something having a few beers at a party with some of his pals and indulging in a little sophomoric humor that was intended to stay behind closed doors.

In the pre-Facebook, pre-MySpace, pre-YouTube, pre-cell-phone-camera era, that might have been a reasonable expectation. But no longer.

The plain truth today is that regardless of whether you partake in the great social media experiment, odds are you're surrounded by people who do. And that means that anonymity, as we used to understand it, is gone. Some things aren't meant to be broadcast, but that's yesterday's thinking. Today, the paparazzi aren't just for the famous. No matter who you are, the best advice might be to live your life with the constant assumption that you're being filmed, fun be damned.

A recent study from the Pew Internet Project looked ahead to 2020, surveying Internet experts about what the future will bring and asking, among other things, whether the 360 view of a life lived in the digital era would blunt our indignation when things like the Favreau pictures surface. Essentially, are we heading toward what Jeff Jarvis called the "era of mutually assured humiliation"? Everyone's got secrets, and everyone knows they could be outed at any moment by some digital mishap, so think twice before you start throwing stones.

The survey respondents were split on that question.

Judging by the reaction to the Favreau incident, we're not there yet. When the "scandal" hit, a torrent of cries came down calling for Obama to cut the young man loose. Shrill, indignant, and completely off base. And yet, perhaps an unavoidable symptom of life in the age of user-generated media.

My guess is it will be a gradual acclimation. As these flare-ups become more commonplace, their shock value will diminish. It seems inevitable. But in the meantime, it's easy to imagine that many other prominents will get raked through the news cycle for more or less innocuous behavior because cameras are everywhere and the Web has made global distribution a trivial thing.

Remember George Allen in 2006? His bid for the Senate wasn't so much torpedoed by doing silly things on Facebook, but by repeating what many took to be a racial epithet at a campaign rally, which quickly became a viral hit on YouTube.

Favreau's antics, much more benign, don't seem to have sapped his career. He's still on the team, the Obama machine has said he apologized, and a Clinton staffer told the Post that "Senator Clinton is pleased to learn of Jon's obvious interest in the State Department, and is currently reviewing his application."

At least someone still has a sense of humor.

Barack Obama again reminded the progressive tech-policy set of why they have embraced him as their patron saint with his weekly radio address (embedded below) over the weekend.

The subject of his address, like much of the talk in these gloomy pre-holiday weeks, was the economy. Obama announced several planks of his economic agenda aimed at saving or creating 2.5 million jobs, following a woeful November in which 533,000 positions were eliminated.

Obama vowed to make "the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s," including clean-tech efforts to make government buildings more energy-efficient, modernizing the schools and shoring up the nation's roads and bridges.

But for the tech advocates, here's the takeaway:

"As we renew our schools and highways, we'll also renew our information superhighway. It is unacceptable the Untied States ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption," Obama said, referring to an international report issued last year by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

"Here in the country that invented the Internet, every child should have the chance to get online, and they'll get that chance when I'm president, because that's how we'll strengthen America's competitiveness in the world."

So with Obama pledging more computers in classrooms, streamlining the healthcare system using e-records and spurring action on what so far has been a meandering quest for nationwide broadband, it came as little surprise that some of the groups long championing universal broadband took the opportunity to glom on a little bit.

Josh Silver, executive director of Free Press: "We applaud President-elect Barack Obama's commitment to investing in Internet for everyone as a starting point for economic recovery."

Fair enough. Broadband would indeed be one of the impetuses for reshaping the economy under the plan Obama outlined on Saturday. And we can even forgive Silver for indulging in a little self-promotion, given that "Internet for Everyone" happens to be the moniker of an initiative Free Press is leading, aimed at driving awareness and advocating for universal broadband.

Less convincing: a note from M2Z Networks headed, "Obama Adopts M2Z Plan, Promises 100% Broadband Availability." M2Z is a Silicon Valley startup that is pressing the Federal Communications Commission to approve a plan to auction a portion of the wireless spectrum to create a near-universal broadband network which would include a free-service provision. If M2Z gets its way, wins the auction and fulfills the deployment requirements, 95 percent of Americans would have access to a free Internet service with connection speeds roughly equivalent to baseline DSL.

Only thing is, Obama didn't say he supported M2Z's plan. Calling for investment in broadband is a far cry from championing a specific (and highly controversial) scheme that skeptics say will almost certainly fall short of its promise while selling the spectrum at sub-market value.

A report in Sunday's Times of London outlining a convoluted deal that would see Microsoft acquiring Yahoo's search business at a $20 billion valuation was quickly met with a healthy dose of skepticism from vigilant tech observers who have been watching the two companies negotiate at arm's length for the past 10 months.

The story, which did not name sources, said the two companies were in talks over a transaction that would see Microsoft take control of Yahoo's search business under the aegis of a management team led by former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller and Ross Levinsohn, former president of Fox Interactive Media.

Microsoft would invest $5 billion into the management team, which Miller and Levinsohn would match through external investment. Microsoft would enter into a 10-year agreement to manage the search business, with a two-year call option to buy it outright for $20 billion.

That seemed to many a staggering sum given that Microsoft offered to take over the search business for $1 billion earlier this summer, when Yahoo's market capitalization was more than twice its current value.

Yahoo's stock has been in free fall since mid-year, as talks with Microsoft -- first about a complete acquisition, then a deal limited to search -- fell through, and regulatory scrutiny squashed an ad partnership with Google.

As of this writing, Yahoo's market cap stood at $14.89 billion.

And Microsoft was prepared to pay $20 billion just for search? Seems improbable, particularly given the rapid debunking Kara Swisher at AllThingsD handed the story as Levinsohn went on record to say it was the first he'd heard of it, and that no one from the Times had contacted him.

That the two companies would be discussing a deal (or warming up to it) is eminently plausible. And cash-flush Microsoft has proven time and again that it is not averse to offering generous deal premiums. (The original offer to buy all of Yahoo, made public Feb.1, represented a 62 percent premium to Yahoo's value at the time.)

But now isn't then, and Yahoo has done precious little to convince investors that it has the vision to execute the turnaround they have been noisily clamoring for. The company is currently focused on the search for a successor to Jerry Yang as chief executive.

So with newly minted board member Carl Icahn buying up large a large volume of Yahoo shares and publicly advocating a search deal with Microsoft, deal talks don't seem too far off.

Here's laying odds that the final transaction, assuming one is reached, will take a different form than what the Times outlined.

The world learned of the violence that raged through Mumbai late last week due in part to a social-media platform that is still little more than a novelty in the minds of many.

This is Twitter, the two-year-old micro-blogging platform that has yet to accomplish -- or even really work toward -- a business model.

But in the fog of the attacks, short messages tagged "Mumbai" were posting at a rate of more than one per second. These were real-time accounts of people watching hotels set ablaze and terrorists battle Indian commandos in the streets.

The instant delivery of these messages meant that information was getting out to the world, or at least the Twitter community, much faster than the big media outlets like CNN and the BBC could learn and make sense of the news.

This may be the most dramatic instance to date of Twitter bringing the unvarnished truth from the scene of an emergency, but it is by no means the first.

Recall in April, when a graduate student from the University of California, Berkeley, was in Egypt covering a protest rally when he and his translator were arrested. The single-word message he Twitter from his cell phone, "Arrested," spurred those following his feed to help secure the student a lawyer, ultimately leading to his release.

The Mumbai "tweets," as Twitter messages are known, are not a replacement for the type of reporting that established media outlets produce in situations of chaos and violence, nor are they meant to be. But they are a sound reminder that citizen journalism has a place, and that old media might find its harmony with new after all.

It wasn't too long ago that citizen journalism took it on the chin when CNN's iReport.com posted a false account of Apple CEO Steve Jobs being rushed to the hospital after suffering a heart attack. There was no hospital trip, and there was no heart attack. Instead, the Securities and Exchange Commission opened an investigation probing whether the report had been part of a short-selling scheme to drive down the price of Apple shares.

Without climbing on a soap box about new and old media, one lesson seems clear. A platform like Twitter has its place. It will never take the place of the type of work that Seymour Hersh does for The New Yorker. But when you're wondering if your spouse or child is still alive as you're hearing sketchy preliminary reports from a region under siege, isn't it nice that someone took the time to develop the technology to make possible the kind of communication that can answer those questions? Just thinking that maybe in the perilous early hours of a crisis, any information is better than none.