Maybe you didn’t know they were coming, but you’ve probably started to notice them in your email: LinkedIn endorsements. The LinkedIn blog reports.

Does LinkedIn really need endorsements? After all, they already have recommendations. I guess that an endorsement is LinkedIn’s version of a like. Which is all well and good, but ultimately pretty meaningless.

The killer app would be if LinkedIn could figure out how to let you tell the truth about that crappy boss or lazy employee in a way that carried real authority as it prevented spiteful spam. That would be something I could endorse.

Tomorrow night is the first debate between President Obama and Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, but the debate has been going on for months in social media. How have Obama and Romney fared? AllTwitter reports.

Looking for social media statistics? One of the best aggregators of stats I’ve come across is The Social Skinny, which posted 216 of them not too long ago. Noodle around the site and you’ll find hundreds more — enough to season any conference call or presentation.

This is not too good. Unless, of course, one believes Facebook’s denial.

Last night’s Rachel Maddow Show had an interesting segment that detailed how Facebook can be used by news media (and, not incidentally, politicians) to gauge the interest level of the general public in specific issues. In this particular case, Maddow talked about a veterans jobs bill that got killed in the Senate, and how a story about it received significantly higher-than-average interest on Facebook. Her observations are relevant to news media, politicians and social media marketers of all stripes.