A work at home mom discusses social media and networking.

The Social Media Mom team would like to offer a big Mazal Tov to a true Web 2.0 whiz and new mommy, Tamar Weinberg and husband/new daddy Brian. The Mashable community director and blogger extraordinaire gave birth to a baby boy last evening, six weeks ahead of schedule.

Twitter has played an integral part in Mommy Weinberg’s friends and fans staying up to date with all the baby info. On March 19th the Mommy Blogger tweeted the announcement of her pregnancy. Tamar even sent out a Tweet from her cellphone less than an hour after the birth of her first child, sharing the joy with us all.

A few social media folks have gotten together and are pitching in money to get a really great gift. This was initiated by @TamarBabyGift and the funds for the present are being collected on Tipjoy via the website set up by Sam Fefer. Tamar is also registered at Babies R Us, for those wishing to send an individual gift for the new Prince of Social Media.

This year is bringing great things for Tamar, and hopefully that will carry on well so she and her family may only know the best of life. Look out for her new book, scheduled to arrive next month. Congratulations!

I remember growing up I watched the television program Nick News as if it were my religion. Every week Linda Ellerbee would host the news show for children and tweens about world events and educational stories in a way that they could easily understand. I still remember one episode of the show she conducted on “Stranger Danger.” While the “Stranger Danger” talk is important to have with your children, we know now that over 80% of sexual assault cases committed against children are committed by a person that child knows and trusts. This information, while horrifying, calls for swift changes in how we educate our children about their bodies, sexual assault, and what to do in a case where someone touches them inappropriately.

With the times changing so drastically, there is a lot more than we have to educate our children about as they grow older. Conversations that are crucial to have now may not have been conversations that you remember having with your parents. For that reason, Jill Starishevsky, an Assistant District Attorney who has dedicated her career to prosecuting child abuse and sex crimes in New York City, has written a great book to help ease parents into having the conversation about their bodies and who they can trust to go to if someone hurts them.

My Body Belongs to Me is a book written for children on the topic that parents can read to their children to start the conversation. It is written as most typical children’s books are, in words that your child can understand at a very young age. As we read and see news reports of sexual assault cases coming up in children at younger and younger ages, you are participating in a potentially life-saving act by reading this book to your child—It is perhaps the most important book you will ever have the responsibility to share.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Max Gladwell.

Our children will inherit a world profoundly changed by the combination of technology and humanity that is social media. They’ll take for granted that their voices can be heard and that a social movement can be launched from their laptop. They’ll take for granted that they are connected and interconnected with hundreds of millions of people at any given moment. And they’ll take for granted that a black man is or was President of the United States.

What’s most profound is that these represent parts of a greater whole. They represent a shift in power from centralized institutions and organizations to the People they represent. It is the evolution of democracy by way of technology, and we are all better for it.

For most of us, social media has changed our lives in some meaningful way. Collectively it is changing the world for good. Given the pace of innovation and adoption, change has become a constant. Every so often we find the need to stop and reflect on its most recent and noteworthy developments, hence the following list.

Please note this is not a top-10 list, nor are these listed in any particular order. It’s also incomplete. So we ask that you add to this conversation in the comments. If you’d like to Retweet this post or take the conversation to Twitter or FriendFeed, please use the hashtag #10Ways.

1. Take Social Actions: The nonprofit organization Social Actions aggregates “opportunities to make a difference from over 50 online platforms” through its unique API. It recently held the Change the Web Challenge contest in order to inspire the most innovative applications for that API. The Social Actions Interactive Map won the $5,000 first prize. The result is a virtual tour of the world through the lens of social action. “People are volunteering, donating, signing petitions, making loans and doing other social actions as we speak — all over the world. To capture the context of the where, this project uses sophisticated techniques to extract location information from full text paragraphs.” You can also join the Social Actions Community, which is powered by Ning…which now boasts more than one million individual social networks.

2. Twitter with a Purpose: This list could be exclusive to Twitter. The micro-blogging sensation was featured on our first two lists (a three-tweet), and it’s certain to be a fixture. From Tweetsgiving, the virtual Thanksgiving feast, to the Twestival, which organized 202 off-line events around the world to benefit charity: water, it’s become the de facto tool for organizing and taking action. Tweet Congress won the SXSW activism award, and celebrity Tweeps Ashton Kutcher and Kevin Rose Tweeted their two million followers about ending malaria. Max Gladwell recently initiated the #EcoMonday follow meme as a way to connect and organize the Green Twittersphere.

3. Visit White House 2.0: Inside of its first 100 days, the Obama administration has managed to set the historic benchmark for government transparency and accountability. The President’s virtual town hall meeting used WhiteHouse.gov to crowdsource questions from his 300 million constituents, complete with voting to determine the ones he’d have to answer. All told, 97,937 people submitted 103,978 questions and cast 1,782,650 votes. The White House continues to raise the bar with its official Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter channels. In so doing President Obama is not just setting the standard for state and local government in the U.S. He’s establishing the world standard. The Obama administration is spreading democracy not by force but through example. Because you don’t have to be an American citizen to be a friend or follower of White House 2.0.

4. Claim your Zumbox: What happens when all mail can be sent and delivered online to any street address in a paperless form? That’s the big question for Zumbox, which has created an online mail system with a digital mailbox for every U.S. street address. And while the answer to that question remains to be seen, it promises to be as liberating as it is disruptive. A key quality for Zumbox is that it’s closed system much like that of Facebook, only instead of true identity it’s true address. This will enable people to better connect with their communities including their neighbors, local businesses, and the mayor’s office. The primary agent of change, though, might not be that this uses street addresses but that it enables direct and potentially viral feedback, which is a virtue that e-mail and the USPS do not offer. The first methods are to request exclusive paperless delivery and to block a sender, but others are certain to evolve such as real-time commenting and ways to share mail with friends, family, and colleagues. Welcome to Mail 2.0. (Disclosure: Zumbox is a client of Rob Reed, the founder of Max Gladwell.)

5. Host a Social Media Event: This is the year of the social media event. No meaningful gathering of people is complete without an interactive online audience, especially when it’s so easy and cost effective to pull off. Essential tools include a broadband connection, laptop, video camera, projector, and screen. Add people and a purpose, such as entrepreneurship. Promote it through social media channels, and you have a social media event. A recent example in the green world is the Evolution of Green, which was hosted by Creative Citizen, a green wiki community. It celebrated the launch of a new Web property, EcoMatters, while also establishing a new Twitter tag. By posing the question, “How can we go from green hype to green habit?” and including the #GreenQ hashtag, it sparked a conversation between attendees and the Twittersphere in real time. Thus was born a new mechanism for getting answers to green questions via Twitter.

6. Travel the World: More than anyone else, Tim O’Reilly knows the potential for social media to change the world. In his opening keynote at this year’s Web 2.0 Expo, he called for a new ethic in which we do more with less and create more value than we capture. This provided the context for SalaamGarage founder Amanda Koster, whose presentation followed O’Reilly’s. The idea is that social media has enabled each of us to have an audience. Whether through Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, or a personal blog, each of us can have influence and reach. What’s more, it can be used for good. SalaamGarage coordinates trips for citizen journalists (that means you) to places like India and Vietnam in conjunction with non-government organizations like Seattle-based Peace Trees. The destination is the story, as these humanitarian journalists report on the people they meet and discoveries they make. Their words, images, and video are posted to the social web to gain exposure and because these stories just need to be told.

7. Build It on Drupal: You may not have noticed, but the open-source Drupal content management system (CMS) has quickly become the dominant player on the social web. While we still prefer WordPress as a strict blogging application, Drupal has emerged as the go-to platform for building scalable, community-driven Web sites. It powers Recovery.gov, a key part of President Obama’s commitment to transparency and accountability. PopRule uses it as a social news platform for politics. And Drupal will soon become the platform for Causecast, a site where “media, philanthropy, social networking, entertainment and education converge to serve a greater purpose.” This is especially significant because Causecast CEO Ryan Scott is transitioning the site off of Ruby on Rails because Drupal has proved more efficient, user friendly, and cost effective. (Disclosure: Max Gladwell founder Rob Reed is co-founder of PopRule.)

8. Green Your iPhone: Looking for an organic diner within biking distance that has a three-star green rating? There’s a app for that. It’s called 3rd Whale, and you can download it for free. (Except that the star rating is actually a whale rating.) Complete with Facebook Connect, this iPhone app locates green products and businesses in 30 major North American cities. It uses the iPhone’s dial function to select a category (food), sub-category (restaurants), and distance (walking, biking, or driving). In Santa Monica, this might give you Swingers diner for its selection of veggie and vegan fare. You could then get directions from your current location using the iPhone’s built-in Google map, rate your experience on the three-whale scale, and write up a quick review. 3rd Whale recently released a new feature that integrates green-living tips, which can show how much energy or waste you’ll save by taking a given action.

9. Unite the World Through Video: Matt’s dancing around the world video inspired many to tears. Today, more than 20 million people have viewed his YouTube masterpiece, where he performs a kooky dance with the citizens of planet earth. The most recent example of this approach is Playing for Change, which connects the world through song. The project started in Santa Monica with a street performance of the classic Stand By Me and expanded to New Orleans, New Mexico, France, Brazil, Italy, Venezuela, South Africa, Spain, and The Netherlands. The project was superbly executed via social media, complete with a YouTube channel, MySpace, Facebook, and Blog. It’s received tremendous mainstream media exposure and also benefits a foundation of the same name.

10. Rate a Company: The conversation about corporate social responsibility (CSR) takes place across the social web on blogs, Twitter, and YouTube, but a central hub for this information and opinion is still to be determined. SocialYell seeks to address this by building an online community around the CSR conversation, where users can submit reviews of companies together with nonprofit organizations and even public figures like Michelle Obama. The major topics are the Environment, Health, Social Equity, Consumer Advocacy, and Charity. The reviews are voted and commented on by the community in a Reddit-like fashion with both up (Yell) and down (shhh) voting. The site is relatively new and still gaining traction, but there’s no question that a resource like this is needed to shine a bright light on CSR and and other related issues.

11. Publish a collective, simultaneous blog post on a universal topic: As Nigel Tufnel might say, this list goes to eleven. Let the #10Ways conversation begin…

Final note: This is Max Gladwell’s third list of “10 Ways to Change the World Through Social Media.” The first was posted a year ago today on Sustainablog.org, and the sequel followed five months later. If a single headline can capture the Max Gladwell raison d’etre, this is it.

Whether the last few years on your resume read SAHM or you were a victim of the recent major job cuts worldwide, the current job market has become extremely competitive. What tools are available to someone who has the qualifications, drive, but just hasn’t landed that perfect position yet? Enter 360 Job Interview, a new site that promises to give you a professional edge. They claim to have a large pool of consultants in every major field, ready to help you polish your resume and perfect interviewing skills.

What is interesting about the idea is that you can connect live with any of their consultants … for a fee. The fee, however, is relatively nominal compared to most career coaches. And it seems easy enough to connect - just log on to Skype and prepare for your interview or e-mail your resume over. This beats going to an office that is either too far out of the way or is only open during inconvenient hours. They also have a blog with some interesting tips for your job hunt that may be worth checking out.

Go check out 360JobInterview.com and see for yourself. This economy is not so job-hunter friendly. It may give you the edge you need to land not just any position, but also the ideal one.

You probably spent a long time marketing and branding to make your logo a face of your company. People now instantly recognize your logo whenever they see it on your marketing collateral. Therefore, you never want to change or redesign it. However what you may not be considering is the fact that with changing time, logo design preferences change too.

Think why big organizations update their logos over time.  The reason is that they know the importance of portraying the more contemporary feel. This however does not mean that you change your logo altogether.

In this writing we are going to discuss the reasons why improving small bits of elements in your logo are necessary to maintain your legacy and brand image.

Does your logo really needs a change?

If you think you should change your logo, ask yourself few questions first, if your answers is no to all or most of the questions below, than the effective logo redesign is the answer.

1. Take a close look at your logo not being as an owner rather being as a customer. What do you feel? Does the design appeal to you?

2. Can the color, font, style and other elements are recognized easily?

3. Is your logo look fresh and modern with contemporary logo design trends?

4. Is your logo successful in portraying a business image to your target audience?

5. Is your logo compatible with all the advertising and marketing mediums?

6. Is you logo unique and doesn’t match with your competitor’s logo?

Reasons for a facelift

It is sometime become crucial to improve the look of your logo. There are several reasons which can justify the above mentioned comments:

1. Updating your logo look more eye-catching to viewers. The graphics, images, colors, fonts used in the logo must all reveal the aesthetic element of the design. If the logo you have does not meet the above standard, a logo redesign is highly recommended to earn benefit out of the logo.

2. Colors, fonts, and all the other elements should be located in your logo in such a way that they are easily visible to the viewers. If the fonts are hard to read, or logo is over-crowded with too many colors, it tends to irritate the customer and he won’t be able to recognize your logo when he sees it next time. Whereas, simple and easy to recognized logo will provide the viewer to memorize it at a glance. If your current logo has necessary message buried and irritates the viewer in finding the purpose of your business, then a logo redesign is a turnkey solution to draw attention of the viewers.

3. The style of your logo is another very important factor. There may be many things you wish to put in your logo, but at the same time you must keep in mind that the style should be similar to the characteristic like the type of your business or the kind of your target audience. If the logo you own does not suitably portray your business purpose to the old customers, logo redesign is necessary in order to carry targeted message accurately and efficiently.

4. The logo design trends are constantly changing. New trends like Web 2.0, Waves, and Organic 3D are in the market that make logos look fresher and eye-catching and portray the company’s image as an innovative and modern. Thus, if your logo is not according to the current logo design trends, and doesn’t look fresh and modern, you will not be able to battle with competition. When such things happen, giving your logo a face lift can prove to be enormously successful.

5. Determine how you are going to use your logo on different marketing and advertising mediums like billboards, brochures, letterheads, pens, buttons etc., therefore, logo is meant to be versatile, and its design should bestowed to any use imaginable. But, if your logo is not compatible with all the available mediums, it’s better to consider redesign.

Keep in mind

You company’s logo is a vital element to its potential success. Hence, getting a logo redesign with slight changes, not only looks appealing to the customers, but also helps in increasing the profits.

This is guest post from Ben Johnson of Logoinn, custom logo design service provider based in UK.

With the approach of the five year mark of creating films online, our work –and work ethic- leads us to the forefront of the expanding landscape and medium of web video. Our accolades speak for themselves because our work provides the missing piece many other companies, small and large, usually miss: creating engagement and interactive elements to your web series. We have set the next new standard for the industry with the release of our new series for Comedy Central’s Atom.com, entitled “My Profile Story.”

The series takes viewers onto the social network profile of “Jenny,” and her group of friends who make up her profile page. When Jenny logs off, the site “logs on” springing to life a full-on social network satire. The show doesn’t end with the episodes themselves, the story continues on the fictional website that is featured in the video, as viewers can log on to the real MyProfileStory.com, where they can continue to interact with the characters by becoming their friends, reading their blogs, and joining the community at the site.

This engagement provides web viewers with an entire world to immerse themselves with. So many companies believe videos will magically go “viral”, and though instances of that do happen from time to time, when it comes to narrative web series, a fanbase to watch episode-to-episode is challenging to sustain. Good content is good but not good enough to keep the momentum.

The Internet as a video platform provides ample opportunities to provide personalization and interactivity that is nonexistent for television. Despite this fact, truly interactive web series are few and far between, and the full use of this new medium is only in its infancy. We have always championed interactivity and creating community with our content over the years, and “My Profile Story” is the culmination of all of our experiences and all that we learned with a website that opens vistas, spending time in the fictional world built for you, blurring the line where the video ends, and the web site begins.

Episodes of “My Profile Story” can be seen mps.atom.com, and the interactive fictional microsite can be seen at http://www.myprofilestory.com

Benny & Rafi Fine (TheFineBrothers.com) are web video pioneers with their 4 plus years on the web and over 25 million views on their films. They speak at conferences around the country on New Media.

I got involved in social media initially the same way many people do - I wrote for a blog and wanted to get it in front of as many eyes as possible.

I found Digg first, then StumbleUpon, then Reddit, Mixx, and on and on. In between, I got hooked on Facebook, decided against LiveJournal and set up a Twitter account. You know the drill. Dip a toe in the water, next thing you know, you’re out at sea, caught in the undertow.

For the most part, I loved it. After a while, I was doing it all purely out of the joy of doing it, and I met some folks I consider to be actual friends - you know, the kind you have in real life.

But as a woman and as a mom (Rafael’s almost 5 and Markus is 2 1/2), I felt, sometimes, as if I were in a boy’s club. I’ve always had lots of male friends, so that didn’t bother me most of the time. Still, it can get a wee bit boring after a while to see the latest hot babe pictures or read yet another “fap fap fap” or “What are you doing out of the kitchen?” comment on a story.

Look, I know they’re kidding and it doesn’t offend or bother me. It just gets a bit old after a while.

We had all that in mind in creating SmakNews, a social media/networking site for women.

The beta launches next week (March 18) and we’re very excited to share our vision with you all.

SmakNews.com is far more than just a social bookmarking site. First off, you can write your own news - create a blog, create your own news story. You can then submit that content for others to read and vote on, but the voting isn’t a simple up or down. We’re looking for emotional feedback - Love it/Hate it/Want it/LOL/WTF/etc. Besides choosing your response, you can, of course, comment on the article to your heart’s content.

And we have in mind that while some women devour any celebrity news they can find, others really don’t care about the latest tit-for-tat in the Brangelina/Jennifer Anniston saga. So SmakNews is split in two: For Her and Celebrity news. Each side of the site has plenty of categories to choose from. On the For Her side, you can read about anything from shopping and relationships to tech news and parenting. On the celeb site, you can read about the hottest tween stars so you can converse properly with your daughters or feed your appetite for the biggest tabloid gossip.

What I liked most about the idea is that it gives me both nourishment and candy for my brain. I get a lot of magazines - Consumer Reports, The Week, New Yorker, The Atlantic, Entertainment Weekly (like how I put EW last?) - but the only magazines I can honestly say I read comprehensively and regularly are The Week and Entertainment Weekly.

I’m a geeky tomboy who loves sports and tech and never wears makeup, but I love to buy shoes and can’t stop myself from reading about the latest celebrity breakup. I tire of publications and web sites that act as if we’re all mommies or beauty queens or bubble-headed gossip-mongers.

We know the truth - women are multi-faceted and usually don’t fit into any one (or two or three) categories.

Don’t worry, all the categories are available on SmakNews.

As the mother of two preteen boys who inherited my love of the internet, one of my big concerns is keeping my family safe online.

J, my 5 year old, loves playing games online, especially on PBS Kids and Yahoo Kids. Unfortunately, both of those sites have sections where you have to sign up to participate, and to a 5 year old, the sections you can’t get in always look like more fun.

W, my 10 year old, knows better than to join sites we haven’t approved yet, but 10 is a very social age and he loves talking with his friends…and with new friends online.

So for both boys, we have created three simple rules that they have to obey if they want to be online.

1) Never give your last name. This was one of the first rules I was taught when I first tried the internet and discovered MSN’s chat rooms, and it’s just as true now. For children under 13 especially, they should never give their last name online, even when registering for a new site. When a site asks for a last name, I’ll tell the boys to put in the initial or first 2 letters of our last name (some sites won’t accept 1 letter as an answer).

2) Keep your birth year secret. There are legitimate reasons why some sites need to know approximately how old you are, usually to make sure you’re old enough or young enough to be on that particular site. BUT giving away your full birthday information can make you vulnerable to identity theft. No, I’m not worried about someone stealing J’s identity right now. But how long will that site keep his information? I prefer to play it safe now so the boys don’t have to worry about it later.

3) Never give out our home address or phone number. This one sometimes seems like it should go without saying if you’re an adult. But children tend to view the world as a friendly place, especially when they think they’re interacting with other children.

Finally, both boys know they can ask us if they’re not sure about something, or think they may have a reason for us to make an exception to a rule.

How about you? What steps do you use to keep your family safe online?