Sharewood Picnic is my weekly collection of new media resources and tools. In it you find the best new media tools and picks I run into every week during my daily research and explorations into the future of independent media publishing.

Photo credit: Olga Shelego

This week as before I have collected for you a great list of new media services and tools that can further enable, augment, enhance your ability to communicate, share and inform yourself in new and more effective ways.

Here is what I have found:

1. Advanced online news filtering, analysis, and research service for intelligence professionals.
2. Future publish and schedule RSS feed content publication
3. New meta-search engine uses extra intelligence to gather, organize and display search results
4. Ego-search popularity measuring service
5. Tools and community site-features to integrte in any web site
6. Universal private online address, gives way to first one-line business card.
7. Educational uses and applications for RSS
8. Learning technologies timeline
9. Social directory of games
10. Open-source collaborative computer-graphics movie project

1. Silobreaker
   
   
   
   Silobreaker is a uniquely powerful information filtering and aggregating service. Silobreaker allows you to get online news, content and structured data from thousands of global sources. It is easy to navigate and includes news and information that is searchable in real-time, topically or geographically. Silobreaker's provides a rich set of advanced analytical tools dedicated to research, monitoring and analysis. Silobreaker offers a 14-day free trial or $199 for a whole year.
   http://www.silobreaker.com/corporate/index.aspx





2. FutureRSS
   
   FutureRSS is a PHP script that converts an RSS feed into HTML and displays only the current RSS feed's items. The FutureRSS script allows webmasters to pre-plan an RSS feed's content items and to publish them all at predetermined dates and times. FutureRSS allows web publishers to prepublish RSS content weeks or even month's in advance. FutureRSS has been developed by the same creators of FeedForAll and if you are a registered user of FeedForAll, the new FutureRSS script is available to you free of charge. Fees for FeedForAll start from $39.95.
   http://www.feedforall.com/future-rss.htm





3. Previewseek
   
   
   Previewseek is a new search, powerful, meta search-engine, showcasing some unique features.
   Previewseek relies on over 35 proprietary, patent pending algorithms utilizing artificial intelligence, Bayesian statistical data mining, word-sense disambiguation, cognitive visualization theory, heterogeneous database querying technologies, and behavioral psychology. Just type in any search term such as ‘Java’ and you will immediately see the powerful differences between traditional search engines like Google and Previewseek. Previewseek immediately understands that the word Java can mean many different things. Did you mean Java the island, Java the coffee, Java the programming language, or Javanese (the language spoken by people on Java island)? If you are not sure, Previewseek immediately gives you definitions of each different meaning. On Google, if you were interested in Java the island, you would have to click through over 70 pages of irrelevant results for ‘java’ before getting to anything useful. Previewseek is more comprehensive as it utilizes all the major search engines to gather the results it displays. Previewseek integrates also a full preview feature allowing you to see the actual web pages of all your search results via an image to the left of each result group. Additionally a Preview link for each individual result shows you to exactly what each result page looks like. Finally Previewseek clusters results by automatically organizing results based on related concepts or words. In beta. Free. Definitely worth trying.
   http://beta.previewseek.com/





4. Egosurf
   
   
   Following my recent prediction that 2006 would be a year in which we will see lots of new and highly effective web metrics and analytics tools and services appear, here is the first in a long series of such tools that I will be showcasing in this column. Egosurf, is the first such service, offering the ability to anyone to measure in EgoSurf own scoring points her own relevance across a number of major search engines and the key social bookmark directory. To use it, you enter your name or search phrase and your blogs’ address, and Egosurf will search Google, Yahoo, MSN, de.li.cio.us and Technorati and will calculate your unique total score points accordingly. Final scores are displayed separately for each search engine and a list of the top 50 "ego surfs" is accessible directly from the home page. Promising. Free.
   http://www.egosurf.org/





5. StepWebZ
   
   
   StepWebZ is an online provider of services and content solutions for webmasters and bloggers, providing an array of simple tools allowing the addition, management and enhancement of extra useful features, like polls, search facilities, surveys and rating boxes on their sites. Other tools offered by StepWebz include actual content, RSS tools to create, integrate and manage custom newsfeeds, news boxes, news tickers, surveys, which can all be integrated in your original site look and feel.
   All such tools are ad-supported and accessible for free by any webmaster or blogger at zero cost. Advertising-free, Pro versions start from $2.00.
   http://www.stepwebz.com/
   





6. 2idi
   
   
   2idi offers a simple and direct way for individuals to create a universal private address or I-name. This means you having a single unified lifetime address under your direct control, which never needs to change no matter how many times you move, change jobs or change email addresses. 2idi provides you with one address for all the ways to reach you - email, snail mail, instant messaging, phone, fax, cell, and more. The 2idi address assigned to you cannot be spammed and will never reveal any of your contact data or personal information without you providing your explicit permission to do so. Your 2idi account includes also an address book that automatically retains a record of everyone with whom it has been shared and of the individual permissions you have allowed. An i-name address can be as easy as your own name in your own native language. Ideally, i-names will allow their users to a single sign-on to all i-names enabled web sites. No longer will you need to remember multiple login names and passwords. With an i-name you have only one login name and one password to remember for all your online transactions. When a website needs your personal data, they can use your i-name to ask your i-broker, just the way a merchant uses a credit card number to ask your bank for payment. And just like any exchange of money from your bank account, you always control any exchange of personal data from your i-broker account.

   I-names are based on the new XRI (Extensible Resource Identifier) standard from OASIS, the Internet's leading XML standards body. XRI is one of the most significant new developments in Internet infrastructure since the advent of the World Wide Web.

   I-names and i-brokers are also the key to ending the era of spam, viruses, and worms. Just as we developed the global banking system to provide a trusted solution to currency exchange, i-names and i-brokers will finally provide the infrastructure necessary to automatically verify the authenticity and integrity of email messages and attachments.

   Presently i-names can be registered for a period of up to 50 years for a single payment of $25.00 USD (includes one year of hosting). The i-name is ready for use immediately upon completion of the transaction.
   http://2idi.com/grs/index.php





7. xBlog Alley
   
   
   An experiential blog (or xblog) is a blog that inspires active participation in events or activities, leading to the accumulation of knowledge or skill. You might think of it as a community self-help or how-to blog.
   It’s different than other blogs because it invites active involvement from the reader in the experience, beyond just responding to what the author has written. An experiential blog contains the following elements:
   • It has a finite number of posts, each of which constitute a specific step towards a stated goal.
   
   
   • Community is created by readers (voyagers) who share comments on their experiences.
   
   
   • It is written by an individual or team of sherpas, who lead the experience and guide voyagers in the journey.
   
   The Escape Plan, created by Kim and Jason Kotecki, is the first such blog.
   http://www.kimandjason.com/xblog/





8. 50+ RSS Ideas for Educators
   
   
   The result of a presentation prepared by talented educator and computer-geek Quentin D’Souza for the Leading Learning 2006 and ECOO conferences is an extremely interesting "ideas-guide" for educators. RSS Ideas For Educators 1.0 (32 pgs - PDF - 251 kb)
   http://www.teachinghacks.com/2006/01/15/50-rss-ideas-for-educators





9. Bertram C. Bruce: Learning technologies timeline
   
   
   Interesting and very useful online resource for communication and educational technologies educators. Here is a learning technologies timeline created by University of Illinois students enrolled in courses on New Literacies, Literacy in the Information Age, Learning Technologies, or Computer Assisted Instruction. Each entry has a link to a student-created web page providing more details about the event; in some cases the page describes a sequence of events leading up to or following from the cited event. An earlier version of this project is still accessible online as the Educational Technology Timeline.
   http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~chip/projects/timeline/





10. Millions Of Games - The latest action games
    
    
    Millions of Games is the equivalent of digg, delicious or flickr devoted to games only. People submit and vote/rate for games allowing a spontaneous social directory of games to grow and provide easy access and reputation to the thousands of games available on the Internet. In development since the end of 2004 MOG is finally ready for prime-time. When you 'MOG' a game it gets added to your list of games (your MOG) and you get to see how many others have MOGGED it too and as such, how popular it is. You also get to rate it and we also track how often you play it, so one of the most powerful aspects of MOG is that it provides several automatic ways of showing you how good a game is. One of the other most powerful aspects of MOG is that you can quickly see who else has MOGGED a game and then get access to their MOG and see which games they like, and so on. Fully free.
    http://www.millionsofgames.com/games/latest/action/
    





11. Orange
    
    
    Project Orange’s prime target is to create an outstanding computer-animated movie short. The participating team is made up of a diverse mix of artists and developers from all over the world, all united with a common goal: research efficient ways to increase quality of collaborative Open Source projects in general. The result of this project will be a short movie, which will be distributed under a Creative Commons license which means it will be freely available worldwide for public viewing and redistribution. The movie will become available in three ways: a) Downloadable version, b) DVD, extended edition including The Making-Of documentary, all the digital files and software (GPL) as used for the production, c) 35 mm film targeted at movie theaters and festivals. The project was scheduled to start at the end of last summer and you can follow its evolution by checking out the always updated Orange Project weblog. The project is a co-production of Montevideo and Blender Foundation,
    http://orange.blender.org/