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

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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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My client Fab­rice Grinda was in Paris this week at Le Web ’09 after spend­ing the past seven months abroad away from his New York City home. At Le Web, con­fer­ence orga­nizer Loic Le Meur con­ducted a fire­side chat with Fab­rice Grinda, co-CEO of free clas­si­fieds site OLX, Inc. Please check it out above.

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