W2Meet offers a new approach to business social networking sites. Instead of being a mere space where users can convene and interact, the vision of the team behind it is to pair users based on key criteria. It can be said then, that it brings a more dynamic twist to the whole process as W2Meet actively pushes members together based on common business interests rather than just leaving members to find each other. It also helps members who are active promote their businesses, and perform further activities to make themselves known.

LinkedIn, the social network for careerists, whose $53 million funding round in June valued the company at $1 billion, has agreed to swap content with business news broadcaster CNBC.

The deal, announced Thursday, will feed CNBC’s articles, data and video to LinkedIn’s 27 million users, while allowing CNBC to tap LinkedIn users as participants in surveys and on-air question-and-answer sessions with reporters and newsmakers. CNBC.com, the network’s online unit, will integrate LinkedIn’s network functions.

The agreement extends CNBC’s audience at a time it is seeking to fend off a challenge from the Fox Business Network launched earlier this year by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. LinkedIn, meanwhile, has seen rival social network Facebook evolve from a refuge for college students to an online site that increasingly accommodates mid-career professionals.

The tie-in is the latest effort by LinkedIn to broaden its content through media partnerships. In July, LinkedIn cut a deal that gives users access to personalized industry news from The New York Times that can be shared with a social network.

In June, LinkedIn nabbed a $53 million series D venture found that implied a $1 billion valuation. At the time, Chief Executive Dan Nye told CNBC that the company “very likely” will stage an initial public offering, but at a price far beyond $1 billion.

LinkedIn, based in Mountain View, California, is backed by A-list venture capitalists and angel investors, including Bain Capital Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and Marc Andreesen, founder of Netscape.

Mr. Nye took over as chief executive in February 2007, replacing founder Reid Hoffman, who remains as chairman. Mr. Nye is a veteran of consumer products company Procter & Gamble and finance software maker Intuit.

In 2007, Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook that implied a $15 billion valuation for that social-networking site. That deal, however, was considered a strategic investment for Microsoft and made the Redmond, Washington, company the exclusive third-party advertising platform for Facebook.CNBC is a unit of media, financial and industrial conglomerate General Electric.

Identity thieves are moving beyond traditional phishing attacks and using popular social networking and video-sharing sites to infect our computers with spyware.

Symantec’s latest Internet Security Threat Report, which covers the last half of 2007, is scarier than any summer movie.

While malware used to be aimed at affecting a user’s computer, the report says, now it’s aimed at stealthily collecting the user’s information.

Marc Fossi, one of the computer security firm’s researchers for the report, spins this scenario: ID thieves compromise your friend’s account and infect his Web page with malicious code dressed up as something you might want to download — a picture or a link. When you click on it, your computer is infected with a tiny piece of malicious code called a Trojan.

“That very first Trojan is pretty dumb in itself,” Fossi said. Its job is to sit undetected and then surreptitiously download instructions from a website the hacker controls.

Its first assignment may be to collect your account user names and passwords. Once it has collected and transmitted that information to its programmer, Fossi said, it may get new instructions for a series of other spy and hacking jobs on your accounts. Hackers may use your user name and passwords to plant malicious codes on your Web pages and sell the rest of your information on the black market.

Hackers have been so successful at getting our information, the report says, that black market prices have dropped.

Your Gold Card’s worth about 80 cents — down from a dollar in the first half of the year.

Bank accounts trade for about $10, Symantec said. And sellers give discounts to those who buy in bulk.

Trojans aren’t easy for end users to find. They may use a “shotgun attack” to exploit multiple gaps in your computer security at the same time, the Symantec report said.

“It’s pretty scary and overwhelming,” Fossi said.

When a computer security guy says this, it’s time for the rest of us to be very afraid.

So what can you do to protect yourself?

• Take a holistic approach to security, Fossi said, and have many layers of protection. Antivirus software isn’t enough. You also need firewalls and anti-spyware or anti-phishing software that can tell you if information is being exported from your computer.

• Don’t use the same user names and passwords for all your accounts. It makes a hacker’s job easier.

• Don’t open or respond to phishing e-mails, which often carry malicious code. Delete them without reading them. If your bank really tried to contact you, you will find the same information when you log into your account.

• Look at URLs to make sure you weren’t redirected to a spoof, or counterfeit, site.

• Don’t download information from sites you don’t know and check over your own Web pages to make sure there’s nothing lurking that you didn’t post.

The FTC has an easy-to-understand guide to computer security at onguardonline.gov. The site also can help you find reliable tools to protect your computer.

Staysafeonline.org also provides good information about computer security and has links to products.

The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team issues alerts and posts helpful information on its site, www.us-cert.gov. See its “Recovering from a Trojan Horse or Virus” for a step-by-step guide.

To read Symantec’s report, go to symantec.com/threatreport/.

JupiterResearch has released a report suggesting that 50% of brand marketers in the US are going to target social networking sites in their marketing campaigns in 2007.

Some of you may have already dabbled in the social networking phenomenon inadvertently by signing up for Friends Reunited, for example, or looking for clips of classic 1970s rock groups (well I did any way) that fellow travellers have uploaded to YouTube. Alternatively perhaps you signed up for Soflow or Ryze for some more serious, business oriented networking.

College students used to be the exclusive users of the social-networking site Facebook, but now members of the corporate world over age 25 are flocking to the site.

Which raises this question: What should I do if a boss or co-worker tries to add me as a “friend”?

If they accept the request, they could be giving up more personal information than they would ever share at the office. If they don’t accept, the boss might be