Whether you want to lose weight, get in shape, manage your time or money, live a more sustainable or philanthropic life, or quit smoking, chances are there is a Web 2.0 tool out there to help you succeed with your 2010 new year's resolution.

Here is a list of some of the top-rated sites for helping you achieve some of the resolutions most often made: weight loss, healthier living, quitting smoking, philanthropy, and better money and time management. And if you don't have a resolution yet, perhaps this list can help you find a worthy one!

Inclusion in this list is based on how well a tool is rated in common review sites and the cost of a tool's service. Reasonably priced services and sites that offer a free version were more likely to make the list, as were sites that offer some sort of collaboration or interactivity when applicable.

Weight loss & fitness

David Little, BodyDaemon's resident Personal Trainer & Fitness expert.

BodyDaemon is a free lifestyle monitoring tool that allows members to record their workouts, food, body, goals, injuries and lots more. Share as much or as little information as you like. Members can update their journal via the Website, your Facebook application or mobile phone.

Extrapounds is a free online weight loss community that provides you with weight loss tools to help you stick to your diet plans. It is where Extrapounds members share their experiences and support one another on their journeys to becoming weight loss success stories.

Fitness Journal is designed to enhance any diet or exercise program. They do not tell you what to eat or how to workout. Fitness Journal allows you an easy, interactive way to manage your workout and diet information. Their software will help you focus on the end result, and motivate you to keep moving in the right direction.

ProjectWeightLoss is an online community of users looking to achieve a healthier lifestyle. It offers tools to help you count your calories, decide on a diet program and a fitness program, and evaluate where you stand weight-wise. Plus, you'll be in contact with a lot of like-minded people.

SparkPeople's mission is to SPARK millions of PEOPLE to reach their goals and lead healthier lives. They offer nutrition, health, and fitness tools; support; and resources that are free. Their weight loss program teaches people to stop dieting and transition to a permanent, healthy lifestyle.

Thintopia is an online community with the purpose of helping each member reach his/her weight loss goals. They are dedicated to providing services the community needs to motivate, inspire, and educate each other. The main service they provide is free weight loss competitions.

Traineo's mission is to create the most effective health and fitness community on the Web by combining the latest software technology with sound information and services from the world's leading health and fitness experts. Traineo is the culmination of over six years of development, testing, and focus group studies in partnership with leading experts in weight loss, health, sports, and fitness.

Healthy & sustainable living

Fivelimes is an entirely user-generated community that acts as your independent resource for information on the latest eco-friendly and socially responsible products and services. Our mission is to make the job of finding, discussing, comparing, and shopping for green products and services around the world extremely easy. The more people acting together, the greater our impact will be.

Green Map System energizes a diverse global movement of local map-making teams charting their community's natural, cultural, and green living resources with universal icons and adaptable multi-lingual resources. Explore hundreds of perspective-changing Green Maps created by local Map teams in 50 countries.

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If you're a blogger, one great way to reflect on the year's happenings is to just go through all the posts you wrote for that year. After a trip down memory lane, I put together a collection by category of the most popular and my favorite posts (across all the sites I write for) of 2009.

Personal experiences

Hey PR, bloggers are not tools to be used - There's a gentle give-and-take relationship between journalists and PR people. But now that bloggers are in vogue, there's a sense that some PR reps can use bloggers as tools for their clients. It's obvious and obnoxious. Here's my personal story of what one PR firm did. Make sure to watch John C. Dvorak lay into me about it on Cranky Geeks (happens at the beginning of the show), and then there's an incredible Update: Bad PR experience story. PR firm’s client is obtuse.

Social media “gurus” and some bloggers are egotistical jerks - A PR rep made a mistake of ccing everyone on an email. Instead of unsubscribing, or doing nothing, many people on the list decided to hit Reply All and tell everyone what they thought of this woman. Insulting, rude, and the people on the list were well known social media people.

Pepcom: We’d like to invite you to a party that we don’t want you to attend - Pepcom has an 11-year-old policy of not inviting journalists/consultants to their events. Must be full-time journalists. Even though I've been attending their events for six years they decided to send me an invite, let me accept, and then uninvite me.

My personal Twitter policy. What’s yours? - So often I see people telling others how to behave on Twitter. I think the issue is do you know how you behave? Do you have a personal policy and do you stick to it?

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Videoblogging as 'a life-altering experience' from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

I used to be heavily involved in the videoblogging movement back when video on the Web was just starting out in late 2004. I was one of the first 50 members of the Yahoo Videoblogging Group (now about 3,000 members) and launched Ourmedia, the first free video hosting and sharing site, in March 2005.

Video creation and sharing went mainstream in 2006, so much so that Mashable reports YouTube Is the Top Social Media Innovation of the Decade.

So I love to highlight people who have successfully incorporated video into their online lives and can evangelize its import without getting preachy.

I shot this video interview with Sukhjit Ghag back during the 140 Character conference in New York. Since then Sukhjit (pronounced sook-jeet) has become the social media rep for Sony Electronics (@SonyElectronics on Twitter).

Sukhjit talks about how videoblogging has gone mainstream and how liberating it is compared with her past career as a television producer-writer. She calls it "a life-altering experience." Her most important piece of advice? "Just forgive yourself -- just do it!" Don't get caught up in the technology -- it's simple to use a Flip cam, Kodak Zi8 or Nokia video-enabled video camera to capture slices of everyday life.

Watch, download or embed video on Vimeo

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You may be losing out on opportunities to improve the reach of your RSS feed or blog.

These optimization tips can help:

• Burn your feed to Feedburner.com. Take advantage of the optimization and analytics features they offer.

• Offer alternate ways for readers to subscribe to your feed. Use FeedBurner tools like email subscriptions and subscription buttons like the ones on AddtoAny.com to offer more choices for your readers.

• Add your feed to as many feed directories as you can. Don't assume that just because a service is being pinged (notified) about your posts, that your feed is listed in their directory. Start by claiming your blog at Technorati.com. Then use the toprankblog blog directory list to find more.

• Import your feed into your social networking sites. Facebook allows you to import RSS feeds into your profile and offers applications for you to import feeds into Facebook pages. LinkedIn offers an application to include your feed in your profile. And you can use a tool like HootSuite.com to import your feed into your Twitter account.

• Create a lifestream or social page. Start an account with a lifestreaming service like FriendFeed or create a page on a social site like Squidoo. Import your feed into your new accounts along with relevant information from your other social Web accounts.

Though these tips will help improve the reach of your RSS feed or blog, the best way to get more subscribers is to regularly generate as much quality and on-topic content as you can.

Previously in this series

• Survival Guide Chapter 7: Do you have a strategy for social bookmarking and crowdsourcing?
• Survival Guide Chapter 6: How to advertise your business on Facebook
• Survival Guide Chapter 5: Podcasts, vidcasts and Webcasts
• Survival Guide Chapter 4: Building a WordPress-powered website
• Survival Guide Chapter 3: RSS feeds & blogs
• Survival Guide Chapter 2: Preparing content for the social Web
• Survival Guide Chapter 1: Cre­at­ing your social media strategy

Transitioning from a print to a digital news world from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

If I were starting out in journalism today, I'd probably opt to work for a Web-based publication -- or start my own -- rather than learn the ropes at a newspaper. Because those ropes are becoming increasingly frayed.

We've been checking in periodically with young people in the journalism field to get their take on how they're dealing with the enormous changes taking place in the mediasphere.

One such person who immediately impressed me is Sharon Vaknin, a student at San Francisco State University and a producer/gadget guru at CBS Interactive's CNET.com. She discusses her entry into journalism, broadcasting and the news business in this 6-minute video interview shot at a busy intersection in San Francisco.

Sharon says she's "not really worried about" the future of the news business. "Web 2.0 has given us the opportunity to be more collaborative," she says. "Because online is so collaborative right now, news will never disappear."

She points to innovative programs like the New Media Lab and Visioning Summit as helping in the transition between traditional print journalism and its digital future.

Watch, download or embed the video on Vimeo

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Rachel Sklar, Rachelle Hruska and Anastasia Liapis at last February's Social Media Week.

SF, London, Berlin to be part of wide-ranging global teach-in

Spent an hour on a conference call this morning where it was announced that Social Media Week, inaugurated last February in New York, will expand to include San Francisco, London, Berlin, Toronto and São Paulo, Brazil.

The weeklong event will take place Feb. 1-5, 2010. The goal is to "explore the profound impact that social media has on culture, business communications and society at large ... and to create a global platform for conversation, connectivity and learning," said event organizer Toby Daniels, who was on the call.

While the Socialmediaweekny.com site talks about a five-day conference, it's less a conference than a sprawling series of loosely connected events all related to the theme of social media. (I like to think of it as a "teach-in," though perhaps that's too retro a term.) Events will span a variety of formats, ranging from talks, presentations and panel discussions, to interactive workshops, seminars, networking events and drinks receptions. Some will be free, others will have an admission charge. Some will be put on by marketing groups, others by nonprofits and social change organizations. They'll all be listed in a public calendar.

In San Francisco, Chris Heuer of the Social Media Club will be the local organizer, natch, and there will be a daylong jobs retraining summit as part of the event. Chris is setting up a Basecamp site for volunteers to help organize the events.

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Is your BS detector optimized to deal with the new realities of democratic media?

It's become a truism that we’re all media creators now, from bloggers and podcasters to the most wet-behind-the-feathers Twitterer.

Along with the new freedom to create comes more responsibility: The new media ecosystem places an increased burden on all of us to become more perceptive consumers and dissectors of media. In the age of We Media, it’s important that we be able to discern fact from fiction, to separate reportage from speculation and to not become unwitting participants in the latest spam scam.

In short, we need to sharpen our online media smarts.

A couple of years ago I was tempted to write a book called “But I Heard It on the Internet!,” but Farhad Manjoo's book, “True Enough, Living in a Post-Fact Society” beat me to the punch. Like many of us, Manjoo bemoans a society where anything can be accepted as true if it’s said loudly enough, repeated often enough and circulated widely on the Internet. We’ve become so lacking in basic media literacy skills that an entire segment of our population believes whatever its cultural leaders tell them to, facts be damned.

Every day, when we take a ride on our favorite search engines or tune in to our favorite news sites, we seem confident that we know how to spot the good stuff and weed out the nonsense. But do we?

Here’s a guide to help you optimize your BS detector to deal with the new realities of democratic media.

1. Give your trust to sources that earn it

Just as print newspapers run the gamut from tabloid sleaze to the New York Times, so too you can find any flavor of news, from celebrity sleaze to public service journalism, in the online arena.

What’s changed in recent years is that we no longer rely just on traditional media brands for our news diet. Individual bloggers, hyperlocal news sites and alternative media publications now command a good deal of our mindshare. Before you give your attention and retweets to the newcomers, ask:

• Do I know who’s behind this site, or are they hiding behind a cloak of anonymity? Use easywhois.com to find out who owns the domain if there’s no author listed.

• Has the site been around for a while? Alexa will tell you.

• Is there a way for users to leave comments on the site or communicate with the producer?

• Does the news source link to materials that authenticate his report?

• Does the source have a presence on Twitter?

• Are other users linking to the site? Check on Technorati for the site’s “link authority.”

Even generally reliable information sources on the Web aren’t wholly reliable. For instance, just because it’s on Wikipedia doesn’t make it true, as I learned first-hand from people like Forrest Sawyer, who told me his Wikipedia entry is riddled with errors. Don’t take entries at face value -- follow the source material to see if it adds up.

What’s important is not whether news or information outlets occasionally slip up –- we all do –- but whether they have mechanisms in place to prevent and correct mistakes. In other words, minor blips notwithstanding, are they earning our trust?

2. Get out of your bubble

A generation ago, Walter Cronkite said that an informed citizen needs to check multiple stories from multiple locations rather than rely on a single news source, whether it’s the New York Times or CBS News. His advice resonates even more strongly today with the rise of hyper-partisan media from the right and the left.

Avoid the media echo chamber, which exposes you to only a narrow prism of views and discourse. A good way to burst your isolation bubble: Broaden your online diet by bookmarking overseas news sites.

Good choices include BBC.co.uk, the Guardian, Finland's Helsingin Sanomat, Israel’s Haaretz, Australia’s News.com or the Australian Broadcasting Company. Read opposing points of view. Use a news reader to subscribe to a search term like "health care reform" or "Afghanistan war" to funnel in an even more diverse range of coverage.

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The social media disclaimer start-ups should know

I get asked a lot: “How do I make money off social media?” Uhmm, well, you use the magic wand of online web awesomeness, obviously. Or maybe not. We have all read a million articles pointing us toward tools we should be using, things we should be considering, and the best practices we shouldn’t ignore. We get it: Social media is valuable. I think by now we all understand the importance of social media as a visibility engine and viral message maker. It can be used to enable conversations, announce information, put out fires, and so on.

It can do a lot. But it has limits. Ohhh buzz kill.

The reality of a start-up culture

Having lived in both Los Angeles and now Seattle, I have been surrounded with start-ups. In fact, it was a huge push for my location decisions in general. Start-ups face unique challenges, especially right now. No surprise there.

Start-ups also have a ton of options. They really are entering with a clean slate most of the time and, often, a huge number of resources. They have investors, boards, friends, family, old colleagues, old networks, etc., all pushing for them and offering a helping hand. So when it comes to deciding where they want to invest their energy and call in those favors, it can get tricky.

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It's about targeting the right few, not the undifferentiated many

Many B2B companies ask me whether social media is right for them. This post is all about why social media and B2B go hand in hand.

Social media is all about conversational marketing, and that's why it works so well with a B2B strategy. Social media is not about the masses. It is about reaching your target audience. Listening before selling and hearing before talking.

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