Robin Good’s New Media Picks of the Week: n.31

Sharewood Picnic is my weekly selection of new media gems found along my explorations during the past seven days. Many are new tools that have just been launched and are ready for you to take for a test drive.

My goal remains to provide you with constant access to those tools and facilities that can enhance, enable, augment and support your ability to be effective online publishers of some kind. If this is what you are after, check these out:

1. Book and music recommendation site
2. Personalized search engine builder tool
3. Worldwide instant messaging and SMS from mobile phones
4. Quality customizable high-speed file hosting service
5. Thumbnails previews of most popular del.icio.us searched sites
6. New online UK-based press release clearinghouse
7. Washington Post visual news cloud
8. Online clearinghouse for BitTorrent content (Win)
9. Online PC security scan service from Microsoft (Win)
10. Autopilot to schedule your computer next actions (Win)

Here the details:

1. Douban
   
   Douban is a book and music recommendation site. Registered users can post reviews, browse reviews posted by others or search by title, ISBN, title, author or tag. Users will find the site similar to the recommendation system of Amazon, without the ability to buy the books instantly. Free to register.
   http://beta.douban.com/
2. Rollyo
   
   Already familiar to the many early adopters out there, this is indeed a super duper of a gem. Definitely what I would call a “newsmastering tool” Rollyo lets you “roll your own search engine” that only scours the sites you select. Called “searchrolls,” Rollyo’s savable, personalized searches are useful for scanning several sites at once so only info from your specified sources is actually delivered. Rollyo lets you save your searches, browse other people’s searchrolls and search multiple sites simultaneously. Rollyo also offers a fully working Firefox plugin, a custom searchbox that can be embedded in your web site, several desktop widgets and more. Free to join.
   http://rollyo.com/explore.html

Here all the other ones:
New Media Picks Of The Week: Sharewood Picnic 31