Ever wish you could just take over your Mom’s computer when she calls you with a PC problem? A free peer-to-peer app called CrossLoop lets you do just that, acting like one of those pricey, help-desk applications used by corporate IT departments. You have to first download it to both your PC and your Mom’s and then when it is launched you can remotely see whatever is on her desktop and take it over to fix it from 3,000 miles away.

The eight-person startup just raised $3 million in an A-Round led by El Dorado Ventures (which is also an investor in Coghead). CrossLoop’s P2P app has quietly gained a following among the do-it-yourself tech support crowd (it only works on a PC currently, but Mac and Linux versions are coming). “CrossLoop is for both family and businesses” says co-founder Mrinal Desai. The company says it has 300,000 users worldwide who have collectively used the application for more than 12 million minutes of desktop sharing. The first million minutes took 154 days to accumulate. The last million took only 11 days.

Today CrossLoop is also launching a redesigned site that comes with free accounts for anyone who wants to make a business out of CrossLoop, or just share their expertise. The profile page shows how many sessions you’ve had on CrossLoop, along with comments and ratings from the people you’ve helped (or whose computers you’ve messed up, depending on your skill). You can watch a demo video on YouTube.

The idea is that IT consultants could use these profile pages to build a reputation. And it is not just for help desk issues. You could use CrossLoop for remote training on applications like, Wordpress, PhotoShop or Final Cut Pro, really anything where you have to show someone how to do something on a computer. After every session, the person you helped can rate you and comment on the session from inside the CrossLoop app. That information then gets automatically updated to your profile. There is also a widget you can put on your own Website or blog that updates your CrossLoop stats as well.

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Can’t keep up with all those magazines piling up in your mailbox, especially the high-brow ones you thought would make you smarter but never have time to read? Well, cancel those subscriptions and head on over to Brijit, a self-styled “Thinking Man’s Digg.”

There you will find 100-word abstracts on the latest articles from magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Economist, Fortune, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, and Wired, with links to most of them. The site also covers video from 60 Minutes, Charlie Rose, The Colbert Report, and The Daily Show. Readers vote the best stories up or down, so you can keep up on the ones most likely to come up during a dinner party. You can even get paid to write abstracts, $5 apiece if your submissions are accepted.

Brijit is designed to be a filter for the smart set. But it oddly defines smart only as what’s in print. Where are the blogs? Other than Salon and Slate, very little online-only media is represented. Perhaps that is because Brijit is focussed on long-form narrative, and there is not much of that online. But it makes you wonder whether sifting through the dead-tree titles will be enough to keep readers coming back to this site, or whether they will prefer a broader view of the world.

Brijit has raised $1 million from angel investors, including former Time Inc. editor-in-chief Norman Pearlstine.

(Disclosure: I worked at Time Inc. when Pearlstine was the editorial boss there).

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eBay just launched more than 600 micro-social networks on its site called eBay Neighborhoods. Each one is organized around a different product, like coffee, iPhones, Eames furniture, Seinfeld memorabilia, or Ford Mustangs. Content from across eBay—including eBay blogs, guides, reviews, and product search—is pulled into each eBay neighborhood and packaged into widget-like modules. Members can join whatever neighborhoods they like, and add to discussion boards there, post photos, invite friends, and meet other people who share the same consumer obsessions.

Visually, the neighborhood pages are an improvement from the bare-bones utility I normally associate with eBay. The product search, for instance, is a rectangular grid of thumbnail images that enlarge when scrolled over, and reveal product and price information without requiring a click-through to another page.

Each neighborhood acts as a socially-mediated shopping guide that drills down into a very specific product category. eBay members can join as many neighborhoods as they like or even suggest new ones. It’s a smart way to surface content created by eBay shoppers (because I’m not sure how many people are reading those eBay blogs).

After its recent Skype blowup, it’s good to see eBay focusing on what it knows best: shopping.

Still, what these neighborhoods are lacking is access to the outside world. What would really be smart would be if eBay allowed anyone to easily take any module on a neighborhood page—the reviews, the visual product search, the discussions, or the eBay blog posts—and embed them on other Web pages like Facebook, MySpace, or their blogs. People who are really into modern furniture might put that particular product-search module on their blog, for instance, just because it surfaces cool-looking Eames chairs and retro clocks available on eBay Making such widgets available would help draw more traffic into these shopping neighborhoods. And if eBay tied them into its affiliate-fee program that pays for each referral that results in a sale, you’d have these widgets all over the place.

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Time-waster of the day: Sim Web 2.0. It’s a little flash game that automatically generates a name for your Web 2.0 startup, like Twitcast or Youcrunch, a press clip, and a list of things to do to build the company:

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