This is the A2SM Link Post for December 23rd:

• Twittered Toddler Death Immediately Converted into Flame War – twitter – Gawker – Shellie Ross lost her two-year-old child when he drowned in the family swimming pool. She tweeted about the incident, hoping for emotional support. How do you think that went?
• How a Fake Twitter Death Report Tragically Came True – Chris Henry – Gawker – On December 16th, someone impersonating a newspaper writer falsely reported the death of football player Chris Henry. Henry died about 12 hours later, according to news reports, finally making one of Twitter’s many fake stories come true.
• Play And Share Your Music Collection In The Cloud With tunesBag – Vienna, Austria-based tunesBag is opening up the public beta version of its social music service today, after allowing access by invitation only for the past year or so
• Qik Live Recording Finally Makes It To The iPhone (Legally) – The live video streaming application Qik has just been approved in the App Store and should be available shortly, we’ve learned. The company submitted the app a couple weeks ago following the approval of Ustream’s live streaming application, and as expected, Apple also had no problem with it now. This marks a change from Apple, which previously was blocking all apps that did live video (recording) streaming
• More People Around The World Get Their News Online From Google News Than CNN – Well, Rupert Murdoch is going to love this. More people around the world get their news online from Google News than from CNN or the news properties of the New York Times. In November, 2009, according to comScore, Google News attracted 100 million unique visitors worldwide, making it a larger news site than CNN (66 million) or the combined properties of the New York Times (92 million). But do you know who is even larger? Yahoo News, with 138 million unique visitors worldwide. Funny how you never hear Murdoch complaining about Yahoo News.
• Making Facebook Pay – Facebook – Gawker – Facebook doubtlessly hoped forcing open user profiles would help the social network compete more profitably with open systems like Twitter. But there could well be a multi-million-dollar price to pay for the aggressive change, particularly if Facebook broke the law.
• How Google CEO’s ‘Ex’ Girlfriend Keeps Tabs on Him – marcy simon – Gawker – Eric Schmidt’s rekindled relationship with sometime girlfriend Marcy Simon may be heading into another season: After a summer of hanging out and an autumn jet ride, they’ve been spotted again this winter. And Simon’s keeping a close eye on Schmidt.
• Google Attempting to Swallow Trashy-Tasting Yelp – yelp – Gawker – Google is more likely than not to buy Yelp, say news reports. Which raises one glaringly obvious question: Will Google exacerbate or correct the local review site’s worst tendencies, which have brought extortion allegations, porny bacchanals and physical violence?
• Did Yelp’s Star Banker George Boutros Just Screw Up The Google Deal? – yelp – Gawker – There’s some amusing finger-pointing going on in the aftermath of the Google-Yelp affair (which, like any affair, may just be in remission).
• Criminal Escapes Prison, Taunts Police Via Facebook – Craig Lynch – Gizmodo – Say hello to Craig Lynch. He’ll give you the finger. The police has been hunting him since he escaped from prison last September, and now he’s using Facebook to taunt them. He seems like a very charming man: