“Happy New Year Everyone!!” Boy, am I glad to be saying those words. After the year we’ve had, I am so ready to start fresh and create a new lifestyle for myself. But then again, who doesn’t say that at the beginning of every new year? If one of your goals for the new year is to live a healthier lifestyle, you simply must check out CenterNetwork’s annual Web 2.0 Fat-Off list for 2009………

“The Fat-Off is where we provide a list of tools to help you lose weight, maintain your weight or just keep your arse in check. Today is a great day to start a new lifestyle. Most of the tools we’ve listed below offer communities to provide a good support base. What I’ve found is that support from others is critical to the success of any program.”

From gadgets and scales to diets and calories, this list of 10 sites gives each a quick review of what it is and what it can help you accomplish. Social networking never looked so good!

From the announcement:

We’re happy to have Kristen join the team.  Social Media Mom will continue its quality content, though look for some exciting changes in for 2009, as we’ll be adding more content that applies to social media enthusiasts and the mommy blogging community alike.  If you’re interested in being a contributor for Social Media Mom, please do let us know.

Exciting times ahead! Don’t worry, I’m not going away, it’s just that the time was right. Happy holidays and have a safe, happy, and healthy 2009!

Photo by i33

If it isn’t bad enough that the economy is in disaray, or that gas prices are skyrocketing, or that natural disasters are constantly knocking at our back door, now I HAVE BEEN BANNED ON DIGG!

I have been a member of the Digg community for over a year and just in the last few months have really tried to boost my presence and utilize Digg as the great social media tool that it is. A good friend suggested I use the Greasemonkey Script to help in Digging my “friends” submissions. Sure, it made for faster and more convenient digging; but then, Digg changed their minds about allowing their users to use this kind of tool……

“A few folks have been discussing the use of scripts on Digg recently, so I wanted to jump into the conversations that happened this weekend. Scripts/bots place additional load on Digg servers (slowing things down for everyone), so using them is a Terms of Use violation that will result in losing access to your Digg account. We are currently looking deeper into recent script activity.”

As of today, there have been about 500-600 accounts banned from Digg and those that have e-mailed their apologies to Digg Support are being turned away with more than a slap on the hand………

“The account has been banned permanently, and will not be reinstated. Because we must be vigilant in protecting against activities that compromise the Digg community, this decision is final and irreversible.”

Wow! That’s harsh. My question is, why no warning, like if you are spamming? Why no e-mail letting us know of the changes to the terms of service so that we might have the opportunity to adjust to their rules? This type of behavior is just going to frustrate Diggers even more, because not only are accounts now banned but many have lost a lot of their friends.

How am I handling my particular execution? I’m hurt, offended and angry but be that as it may, it won’t bring my account back, so I guess I’ll just settle on being an example to all Diggers and say “Don’t use Scripts!”

Social Media Time Vs. Family Time

Social media sites, for those that already consume them, take up a great deal of our day. I don’t mean this in any negative light: it’s just a matter of fact.

So, once you really become a strong member of a community, it’s your duty to keep up that commitment. Then, the next new new thing comes along. Take Plurk for instance - you can actually lose karma by not participating! Microblogging brings the social media time management conundrum to a whole other leve, as it is something that you feel compelled to keep pace with not just from day to day but minute to minute! Whether social media is your work, play, or both, they really can take up a huge amount of work, family, and sleep time. This raises a powerful question…

Where does family time fit in?

Thankfully, I have a large family. It’s important to keep balance in your life, or you can really burn out quickly. I’ve seen far too many driven people that have driven straight up the wrong tree.

Here are 5 tips to help you come back to earth:

1. Be a ninja, social media style.

Tools like ping.fm will allow you to quickly make your mark and let you say what you have to say, when you need more time for your kid’s baseball game than to sit there watching the Twitter public timeline.

2. Get your family involved.

Kids can wear Mixx hats, can’t they?

And no, that doesn’t mean that you need to make them wear social news site hats It means that since you’re at the cutting room floor of world news all day long, you can relate some amazing, breaking, shocking, or just plain odd news that happened to your family at dinnertime. Just don’t overdo it.

3. Avoid burnout at all costs.

Social media burnout ain’t pretty. I’ve seen some take a break and recover, while still others just never come back. And not coming back is just such a shame, considering the time and effort that some people put into the game. Exercise, take walks, sit by a river, knit a sweater, hug your kids - remember what is important in life. We aren’t here to live to work; we should be working to live! I’m a social media dad, and my family is counting on me. Burnout is not an option.

4. Let go of some control, get time back.

So let’s say you are a blogger. Guess what? Lots of people are as well! If you are a solo blogger and you are always feeling the pressure to produce, this may burn you out just like any other social network. Learn to relinquish some of the “perfection” in your own blogging and allow some guest bloggers in. It’s a real win-win: the guest blogger gets a new audience to get their name out, and your family gets you back! Once you have this abundance mentality, you’ll be in much better shape for the future.

5. Learn time management.

If you don’t have some concept of what time management is and you work in social media, you’re toast. Maybe not today, but soon. I’m not suggesting that you need to ascribe to the Getting Things Done (GTD) mentality, just that you should be careful in your time commitments, especially social media ones. Social media has a habit of growing on you and taking up more time than you expect. So, it may be worth just setting aside specific times of the day for social media and staying off it, dare I say for other times. The late Randy Pausch gave a great talk about time management and has some tips here.

Brian Wallace is a social media consultant - get it touch with him on his blog, or follow him on Twitter and Plurk.

As of July 3, 2008 the Genocide Intervention Network estimates that more than 200,000 civilians have died due to violence, malnutrition, and disease and a further 2.2 million people have been displaced within Sudan and an additional 250,000 refugees have crossed the border into Chad.

What does this have to do with social media? Bloggers from all over the United States have realized that this horrifying situation has gone on for too long and are now taking action. My dear blogging friend Mark Hayward made a committment not too long ago and is spearheading the Train For Humanity project………

While serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, Mark Hayward spent his last night in the village listening to the horrific screams of the young woman on the left dying from the effects of cerebral malaria because the proper medication was not available.

That evening he made a promise to himself that one day he’d give back to the world by starting a humanitarian organization.

Years later, Mark was out running, and thought of the successful campaigns like Team in Training (Leukemia & Lymphoma Society) and Joints in Motion (Arthritis Foundation) that have raised funds and awareness for their health-based organizations by utilizing everyday athletes and their training.

Mark thought, “Why hasn’t anybody used a similar model of endurance athlete training to assist with humanitarian fundraising and awareness?” and the seeds for Train for Humanity were planted.

The concept is simple: getting fit + social media + blogging = social good

Mark is so right! By using the web, social media, and blogging in tandem with everyday athletes in training, Train for Humanity is set to support those organizations that help prevent suffering and alleviate the pain of children, orphans, and refugees who have been displaced due to genocide or internal strife and war within their country.

How can you help? For starters, you can sponsor a TFH athlete. You may recognize the names Leo Babuta and Dan Clements. Both are big time bloggers and along with Mark Hayward are trying to raise $50,000.

If a donation is something that you just can’t do right now then consider spreading the word about this organization through a blog post, Plurk post, Twitter post or some other viral social media tool. TFH has even made a sample post that you can use to make it easy for you to communicate the tragedy that is taking place in other parts of our world and how we can help.

You can financially support Mark, Dan and Leo here.

I’m doing my part, what are you doing?

iThryv was pitched as a banking site for kids. Like the game Spore, you start out small and things get more complex as you grow. When you’re younger expenses are tracked with big, colorful graphs. Later in life it gets more complex to include things like car and college payments, all the way to budgeting and savings.

Hangout.net is yet another virtual world. Kids can design their own virtual pad and adorn it and themselves with real-life products. These items reside in their online home, and all link back to online stores that sell them.

Blah Girls, in the words of its celebrity founder Ashton Kutcher, is a “dynamic, interactive, celebrity pop culture environment” played out through the eyes of three fictional characters. It centers on a Web video player with the three stereotypical children literally blahing about the latest celebrity gossip. Intermixed are asides the likes of Family Guy.

Tweegee is a virtual world that mixes e-mail, personal organization, and Flash gaming. It centers on an anime-like avatar that users build part by part. Likewise they can use a similar building tool to make their own hosted site that comes ready-made with templates based on what the kids are interested.

It sounds like TechCrunch50 is off to a great start with new and innovative sites being presented and obviously kids under 18 are no exception when it comes to a target audience. By tapping in to the content that a younger crowd commands, these companies will be able to generate advertising dollars that an already saturated, interactive, adult, market may not be able to offer.

In all honesty though, do we really need another celebrity gossip site? And one for young girls? Come on, Ashton, use those wonderful parenting skills that I read about all the time in People magazine and realize there is already enough gossip going on in school, do we need another website for that?

First Images of Google Chrome

Chrome Eliminates Google’s Middleman Problems

Inside Chrome: The Secret Project To Crush IE and Remake the Web

Google Chrome, Google’s Browser Project

Why Did Google Abandon Firefox?

The list goes on and on with reviews, comparisons and much analysis. In a nutshell, the brains over at Google have built, not just another browser, but a more modern platform for web pages and applications……

“we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better . By keeping each tab in an isolated “sandbox”, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built V8, a more powerful JavaScript engine, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.”

Sounds good doesn’t it? Or is it just a bunch of rhetoric? I think the real question lies in how it compares to IE and Firefox. Eli, over at Search Engine Land, has a great post that outlines 10 key features that differentiate Google’s Chrome from Firefox and IE…….

“Chrome is actually very different from those two browsers, and significantly different from nearly everything else on the market.”

The engineers at Google realized that modern day web browsing is about applications and rich media, so they built Chrome from the ground up and were able to implement tools that other browsers just don’t have. Which brings us to what I think to be the biggest single difference in these three browsers; and that is, how fast Chrome is designed to run. From multi-threading to JavaScript Virtual Machines, Chrome is geared to blow Firefox and IE out of the water when it comes to speed, and Kevin, over at Lifehacker, performed a speed test to determine which browser is fastest that you simply must see!

All in all, Google is hoping Chrome will make the web an even better place but that is totally up to you. Check it out and let us know what you think.

“This incident has made the sports officials realize that web usage by athletes may pose a serious problem and should be addressed properly since it can damage the image of a team and a university - not only of the athlete in question.”

The fact that this incident occured while these two young men were already enrolled in a four year school is one thing, but what concerns me about today’s youth is the careless attitude of high schoolers that will soon be looking for college opportunities and may be turned down due to their lack of discretion on their online profiles……..

“Usage of internet, including social networking websites, is becoming a serious issue for athletic departments across the US.”

What it boils down to is brand management. Institutions are realizing that the profile of any employee, representative, and/or student, may pose the threat of damaging their reputation so they are taking precautions to prevent that from occurring. For example:

“Chicago’s Loyola University has barred its athletes from having profiles on social networking sites completely.”

It goes without saying that social networking sites are a great way to connect to others when used appropriately. But the schools, the teams and your child really do have a “rep to protect” so teach them how to use these tools for their benefit and not their disappointment.

“Sammy Brown looked out at me. He saw me digging happily. ‘Good for you Duke’, Sammy cried. ‘I knew you’d do it, if you tried.’ So I dug further. I dug faster. I dug and dug to please my master.”

The story goes on to say the Duke got quite carried away with his digging. So carried away, in fact, that he was labeled a Digg Spammer. He began to “shout for friends” all the time to digg. He stole a top digger’s icon for extra diggs and began leaving threatening comments to those that would not Digg his shouts.

There are many reasons the Digg Community may perceive Duke and others, a social media spammer and Greg, over at 10E20, has a great checklist that everyone should consider when determining whether or not you are seen as the positive social media maven you think you are.

So ask yourself this, do your actions depict you as a nuisance like Duke, or are you keeping your digging under control? After all……..

“Digg is about community participation, NOT about forceful promotion. So take some of these spammier tactics into consideration and help keep the community (and your account) clean.”

“Using a Web camera or a cell-phone video camera, people record themselves doing anything–watching a football game at a bar, telling jokes, buying new shoes, playing with their child–and can upload it immediately to the Web, where others who subscribe to their videos get the update.”

Evidently, this free, easy, fun way of staying in touch with others is borrowing from the concepts of other microblogging sites such as Twitter and Plurk to tap into the successful microblogging niche. 12 Seconds founder Sol Lipman says;

“I think video as a medium is significantly more engaging than text,” Lipman notes. “If I’m at the bar with my friends, I want to show us having fun at the bar, not just text it.”

12 Seconds launched their “alpha” version of video microblogging on July 24th and invitations were accepted fast and furiously with over 7000 video uploads in a few days. Their plans for the future include more invitations and eventually offering software that will allow outside programmers to build applications using its technology. Sound familiar?

I like the idea of video microblogging, I really do, but my question is this, are people really going to watch video after video of those they are following?  I follow a lot of people on Twitter and Plurk and for the life of me, I can’t imagine having the time to watch their 12 second videos.

So, I requested an invite and have set up my account over at 12 Seconds. I tested it out and recorded a couple of videos. Unfortunately, my recordings left a little to be desired. Besides the fact that the sound was not a match to my mouth, it also sounded like I had a bad lisp. According to Hot Hardware, improvements are still taking place, which is a good thing because 12 Seconds has some work to do before any sign of viral activity takes place.

The site does have all the right ingredients to be a winner, however it will take a trip to Glamour Shots for me to really make the most of it and consider posting it to my blog. What do you think? Is 12 Seconds the next Twitter?