Word-of-Mouth Marketing, Social Networking, User-Generated Content, and all the other reasons why YOU are the Person-of-the-Year are rewriting the way business operates and marketing executes at an ever increasing pace. The iPhone launch would have been big, but it went global-thermo-nuclear with rumor-posts and line-watches and de-boxing and even de-construction. Michael Moore is recruiting Sicko content and generating a mob after launching his movie. And the ignorance and stupidity that operates our airlines has never been better captured than by this guy in 28d.

As social networks and our online identities centralize to manage our individual participation in all of this, a terribly interesting side effect is beginning. As pointed out by The Daily Networker, suddenly our business life can run smack into our personal lives. The comments, photos, links, videos, and other artifacts you’d comfortably share with your ‘real friends’ can be quite uncomfortable or even inappropriate with your ‘professional acquaintances’. Yet FaceBook or MySpace don’t have multi-tier tagging and permission systems that keep these things apart.

The risk/reality of this has obviously been evolving, as ‘googling’ anyone can turn up aspects of their personal life. And of course we’ve had all those teachers who got hassled because they had lives before they became teachers and in some cases imagined they could have private lives after.

But is it a good thing when you connect via a social network with someone with whom you have a perfectly solid professional relationship and suddenly (and without request) come face-to-face with the fact that they support Obama, paint their faces with the No. 17 for Sunday Nascar races, love death-metal, and seem to be really into astrology?

I have no idea what result will come from this aspect of the online conversation, but it will be interesting to watch as these systems cross from the techie corners of society into much more widespread use.