New Media Picks Of The Week: Sharewood Picnic 44

Here is a new basket full of new media delicacies for your Sharewood Picnic.

Once again I have gotten a great bunch of interesting new media tools, resources and pointers I have run into during my daily research and online explorations. Some of these new media tools can enable truly enable new business opportunities, facilitate information research or ease your ability to discover like-minded individuals around the globe.

Photo credit: Mark Scott

This is what I have found this week:

1. Remote driving through the streets of San Francisco


2. Mobile-based electronic payment system


3. Web-based news digest offers thematic channels and mobile phones support


4. Personalized start page integrates news, RSS, blogs and more


5. Social-marketplace for blog-based listings


6. Search trails recorder


7. Multi-language wiki search engine


8. Voices marketplace


9. Podcasting software for recording, editing and publishing audio shows


10. Video tutorials to learn how to make effective photographs

1. Windows Live Local
   
   
   Are you ready to take your own remote-driving tour of downtown Seattle or San Francisco? Thanks to a still early-stage implementation of Windows Live Local allows you to manually drive at-a-distance your virtual car through streets and freeways of major locations in the US. By using your arrow keys and a three-pane video view of the driving scenery superimposed on either a flat road map, a photographic satellite view or a combination of both, Windows Live Local combines interactive driving with mapping. As a user you can also select between race or sports car or a pedestrian viewpoint. The free preview was created with Microsoft Virtual Earth, a set of services for building intelligent Web applications that enable businesses to better serve you with locally relevant information. You can use Virtual Earth and other Microsoft MapPoint technologies in your own projects. Free to use.
   http://preview.local.live.com/





2. Text Pay Me
   
   
   If you live in the US you no longer need to be in front of your PC to send an electronic payment. By using your own credit card you can pre-load your TextPayMe account and start paying services and people by sending them money directly from your mobile phone. To make a payment: take out your mobile phone, send a text message, and answer a phone call. That's it. TextPayMe mobile payment solution works with any phone that can send SMS text messages. There are no additional applications to install. Works only in the US across all major carriers. Free to sign-up and free to beta users. Later TextPayMe will charge $0.15 + 1.35 % for each deposit and auto-debit operation performed as well as $ 0.50 for each withdrawal from TextPayMe to your bank account.
   https://www.textpayme.com/





3. My Today
   
   
   The latest baby from blogger and technology wizard Rajesh Jain, MyToday is a one-stop source for personalized daily news and views. MyToday is a web-based, Ajax-enabled, public news aggregator having pre-selected theme-based collections of RSS-based feeds called Dailies on topics ranging from technology to world news. In addition MyToday has started to offer OPML/Reading Lists to those qualified readers submiting them. MyToday preferred content items can be printed or emailed to friends. A fully mobile version is also available at m.mytoday.com. Free to use.
   http://www.mytoday.com/
4. Pageflakes
   
   
   Pageflakes is Web 2.0 personalized start page in which you can aggregate your preferred blogs, news headlines, your email accounts, your favorite web searches, your notes, and all of your Del.icio.us bookmarks. Pageflakes is accessible from any computer by using a standard web browser. All content components you add can be easily moved or edited to make your Pageflakes just as you like it. Click on "Add Content" on the top left corner and choose a feed or module to add. Click the "x" icon and remove it from view. Signup is free and takes less than 30 seconds. registration is not required and is needed only if you want Pageflakes to remember all of your selections and settings permanently.
   http://www.pageflakes.com/





5. BlogBuy
   
   
   Very similar in concept to Edgeio, BlogBuy is another new web-based service allowing people to buy and sell merchandise directly on their blogs and through news readers. BlogBuy is a blog-centric, social marketplace organized by tags and delivered via the web and RSS. Basically, the site is a marketplace that is browsable and searchable through tags. You can also buy and sell on blogs and through RSS. Registered users sell items with as minimal information as possible. Sellers can also post their items for sale on external websites such as blogs and other marketplaces. BlogBuy fully supports and encourages people to conduct transactions off site through email or other means and it doesn't charge people any transaction fees for conducting the transaction through their site. Free to use.
   http://www.blogbuy.com/





6. Trexy
   
   
   Trexy is an innovative search support tool capable of tracking and saving your favorite picks after having performed a search engine query. If you have found it before why search for it again? Trexy enables you to keep a track of your successful search trails as well as those of others capable online searchers. Trexy enables the recording of all your searches and the web pages you visited across all the search engines you use. Create search trails on your favourite engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN and many other ones. Follow in the footsteps of other searchers who have already found what you're looking for. Trexy helps you to remember where, when and what you have searched for and which web page(s) you visited to find your answer. "My Trails" are your personal collection of trails which you can delete or share at anytime. Get a good visual idea of how Trexy works in 2 minutes by looking at this tour page. Both Trexy and the associated TrailBar are completely free.
   http://trexy.com/





7. Qwika
   
   
   From the same company that has created FactBites, Qwika is a new search engine designed specifically to search through the content available inside wikis. Qwika aims to cover all sizeable wikis in as many languages as possible, to translate them into English, and to make them easily findable through its search facility. Qwika's technology is designed from the ground up to work with wiki-based content and has a number of unique features of interest to researchers and Wikipedia editors. It is the only search engine to index machine translated content, so that users may search for terms in their own language and see results translated from English. The need comes from the fact that Wikipedia's growth in English is well documented, but other languages lag far behind. After English the next biggest content representation inside Wikipedia is in German (a third of the English one), and then Spanish with a mere tenth. The resultant content is machine translated, therefore in much less than a perfect way, but the resulting output is still much better than having no article at all. Further, this new ability provides a starting point for editors to translate manually new content into their own language. So far languages included in Qwika are German, French, Japanese, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Greek, Korean, Chinese and Russian. Moreover, as some country-specific topics are best treated in their native language, Qwika allows this unique content to become available also to English speakers, rolling it all into the one index. Articles from all 11 languages are included in the English language version. Overall Qwika has already indexed 1144 wikis including most of Wikipedia, Wikicities, Wikitravel, Uncyclopedia, Memory Alpha and Starwars. Free to use.
   http://www.qwika.com/





8. Interactive Voices
   
   
   http://www.interactivevoices.com/
   Interactive Voices is a new online marketplace for voices. Like Voice123, Interactive Voices helps you find the perfect voice, on time and within budget. Need a voice over for your new web presentation? Have to have a cool opening intro for your upcoming podcast show? Interactive Voices allows posting your audio needs, preview .mp3 samples and to compare prices among different offerings. DJs, dubbers and anyone with a voice talent can also sign-up and promote her own voice at no cost whatsoever. Interactive Voices allows voice professionals to create their own profile page and to stock it with audio samples in mp3. Interactive Voices also allows easy and automated management of transactions without taking any commission fee. Free 30-day trial. Thereafter, voice talent seekers pay $99 a year or $19.95 per job posting while professional voice professionals can choose between three levels of membership ranging from free to ($99 or) $199 year, depending on the number of options needed (more storage space, ability to receive direct PayPal payments, etc.).
   http://www.interactivevoices.com/welcome-podcasters.htm





9. Podcast Station
   
   
   Podcast Station is Windows application which integrates an award-winning, professional digital audio editor, VoxPro, a robust RSS editor with embedded iTunes support, and a full audio recording unit. Podcast Station, which utilizes a one-screen only interface approach allows anyone to record, mix, edit and publish personalized audio broadcasts to the web. Podcast Station allows publishing online with robust support for RSS generation, iD3 tags embedding and full iTunes support. Great editing functions, keyboard support and simplicity of use. Podcast Station offers a free download trial (13 MB). The full version costs $ 59.95. Video tour.
   http://www.podcaststation.com/





10. Just Show Me How To
    
    
    If you want to learn how to make great photographs as well as learning from professional photographers tips and tricks about the difficult art of capturing quality images, Just Show Me How To offers short video tutorials that show you instantly how to attack or resolve a certain issue. Learn The Basics, Photograph Animals, Photograph People, Take Auction Photos, Take Travel Shots, are some of the many titles available. Prices start at $1.99 per video.
    http://www.justshowmehowto.com/