I've spent the past week alternately shoveling through snow drifts and being stranded away from home with family by a good old-fashioned Nebraska blizzard, so I haven't had much time to check out what's been said about media and journalism this week. On the other hand, I'll be in Portland visiting friends next weekend, so I thought I'd at least give you a mini-review to tide you over until after the holidays. — Most of what we got last week (through Thursday, anyway — I haven't been able since then to look at Twitter or my RSS) came in the form of  retrospectives looking at the year or decade that was and predictions about 2010. Here's a roundup of a few of the more interesting media-related pieces from that category: The massive social media blog Mashable flooded us with year-end stuff. Columbia grad student Vadim Lavrusik has the most useful stuff, giving us a couple of posts of news media predictions for 2010, one about business and the other about content. Both lists function as great summaries of where we are in media innovation right now, with links to great examples and ideas in each area. Mashable also has tons and tons of predictions for 2010 by "social media experts" and makes a decent case for YouTube as the social media innovation of the decade. The New York Times' David Carr has a realistic yet optimistic snapshot of where the news business is right now. Northeastern University prof Dan Kennedy looked at how newspapers fared in 2009 and argued that things weren't as bad as we thought they'd be. Alan Mutter explained why that might be and remembered the 140-plus newspapers that closed this year. CUNY prof Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do?, named Google his icon of the decade. Go figure. Missouri prof Clyde Bentley has a roundup of some of this year's most interesting social media research findings. I love great long-form sportswriting, so I have to highlight the list from Deadspin, the web's largest sports blog, of the best sportswriting of the decade. I haven't read as many of the pieces on this list as I'd like, but those I have read have been brilliant. (I'd start with J.R. Moehringer, Joe Posnanski and Gary Smith.) — John Bollwit has a great post for small newspapers, arguing that a good local news site is not that difficult to create, thanks to WordPress. I absolutely agree, though I do have a bone to pick with Bollwit: His hometown newspaper publisher's email explaining why they don't put much effort into their website is wrong-headed, but it's still reasonable enough to be acknowledged and refuted, rather than dismissed out of hand. This is the mentality of just about every weekly rural newspaper I know of; it deserves a real counterargument. — Once you start on that local news site, Amy Gahran at the Knight Digital Media Center has a solid argument for implementing local topic pages and some fantastic practical advice on how to get started. I love it. Have a wonderful last week of the year, and I'll be catching you again in 2010.