Not all of those mentioned on this list are that "new". Those I think that would be most useful to researchers:
For metrics/statistics - Argyle, TwentyFeet.com & PostRank
For content management - Trunk.ly & Storify
& for Twitter hashtag tracking - HashTracking
Free professional network for scientists. Has useful tools to help - Connect and Communicate: Interact with fellow researchers and build your scientific network. Share and Collaborate: Post updates, discuss methods and co-edit with colleagues. Discover: Download full-text papers, find conferences and scientific jobs.
Interesting short post from RWW about how changes to Twitter's terms of service will adversely impact on the ability of scholars to use it for their research.
A presentation by UTS PhD candidate Penny Hagen (FEIT) on her research into the use of social technologies and participative methodology in the design process.
Free back up service for all or most of your cloud-based data. Works with Gmail, Google Docs & Calendar, Picassa, Twitter, Flickr, Blogger & Zoho. I use it.
Dropbox provides a single folder that allows you to both backup and share files, particularly large files that are a pain to email. It can be used on any computer or smart phone.
ResearcherID is a global, multi-disciplinary scholarly research community. With a unique identifier assigned to each author in ResearcherID, you can eliminate author misidentification and view an author's citation metrics instantly. Search the registry to find collaborators, review publication lists and explore how research is used around the world.
Presentation about the costs of higher education (albeit US costs) and some alternative ways we can assist including more open access, social media and social networks.
Kaggle is a web app for outsourcing statistical and analytics to data scientists who compete to produce solutions to the problems presented by users with their data. It's crowdsourcing for data analysis from computer science to economics to physics. Even NASA is using Kaggle.
Article in The Australian during Research Week at KC (July 2011) about a USydney Professor who has started using Twitter to let people know about his research.
Interesting blog post re the preservation of linked data: "Open data licenses do not merely permit and encourage re-use of data, they permit and encourage its preservation."
Want to write a novel in a month? NaNoWriMo is a great tool for those creative writers out there, but also useful for non-fiction writers as it allows you to easily track your word count.