It’s a new year, and as people bid adieu to 2008 and bienvenue to 2009, there’s a fair bit of social media review, round-up and prediction going on. Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang and Josh Bernoff review the outcome of their social media predictions for 2008, and John Battelle powers up the Searchblog crystal ball to deliver his prognostications for 2009. PaidContent‘s Patrick Smith paints a pessimistic picture for newspapers in 2009, while Jeff Jarvis opts for the silver lining with a list of innovations in 2008 from (mostly US-based) newspapers rounded up by the cheerily-named Newspaper Death Watch. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch takes a more practical and personal approach with a list of applications he’ll be relying on in the year ahead.

Elsewhere on the web:

Mashable’s posted a guide to tracking the Gaza conflict using social media and spotlights WhosTalkin to help monitor buzz around the social web.

Some unfortunate Twitter users fell foul of a phishing scam over the weekend; within hours of the scam’s emergence, Twitter leapt into action to warn its users and help those who’d been affected.

Jay Rosen‘s roped in the crowd to explain Twitter to eggheads, prompting an interesting perspective on how people use the microblogging service and why they find it useful.

ReadWriteWeb has a few recommendations of mobile social networks which promise to be the next big thing.