Backup Online With Jungle Disk

Are you backing up? You should be! If you’ve been looking for an affordable online backup storage space, you might want to give Jungle Disk a shot. This service lets you backup your computer to Amazon’s S3 storage platform quickly and easily.

Recently, Jungle Disk released version 2.0 of their software which debuted a brand-new UI which aims to make the setup of the service even more intuitive than it was before. The new version also now offers support for scheduling multiple backups and has improved performance for large directories and large cache sizes. A new "previous versions" feature lets you set minimum and maximum numbers of previous versions of select files and this option can be customized on a per-backup-job basis.

The pricing for Jungle Disk is very reasonable - you only pay for what you use - no minimum monthly fees or long-term commitment is required. There is a one time purchase fee of $20, but after that, the price for storage is $0.15 per GB and $.10 per GB of data uploaded and $0.17 per GB download. Upload and download requests are priced at $0.01 per 1000 uploads and $0.01 per 10,000 downloads. That’s darned cheap! There’s also an optional "Plus" service that lets you access your files from anywhere for only $1/month.

To learn more about Jungle Disk, go here.

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

It’s good to have programmer friends. One of mine made a tool just for me and he said that I can tell you about it now, too. The tool is called Feedpour and it’s the kind of thing any pro blogger would love. Why pro bloggers? Because for those of us that write professionally, part of our responsibility is turning in invoices that list our blog posts and the rate we’ve charged. For many, I would imagine this is a manual process. It had been for me, at least until Feedpour. What this service does is take an RSS or Atom feed and allow you to export it to XLS, RTF, or PDF formats, which you can download and save to your computer. To begin using the service, you just register your feed on the site, after which you can then export your blog posts at any time by entering in a start date and end date for the posts you want to retrieve. You also must specify whether you want the the data arranged by columns or rows. And last, just pick your preferred export format and you’re done. What a huge timesaver this is! If you have any comments or questions about Feedpour, you can send them in here.

The site Intwition, formerly a Twitter app, just relaunched yesterday as a whole new service. This new version of the site, only ten days old, aims to find and display what stories are being discussed on the internet right now. Initially, those stories come from Twitter as the primary source of that chatter, but as time goes on, other inputs will be added.

The way Intwition works is by listening to the online chatter, and when the chatter level is high enough, posting an unconfirmed story on the homepage.

Example: "Unconfirmed: Something Happening with Earthquake, China, Maginitude, 7.8, Felt"

After that initial posting, Intwition then scans the web looking for articles from verified sources as well as pictures and video. As these items are found, they are posted on the homepage in order of their popularity and relation to the story. Stories stay up as long as they are being discussed. Major stories are highlighted in red or orange and older and minor stories are in smaller text in the bottom of the homepage.

In addition, there is a "new scoop finder" on the right hand side of the page, a feature which updates every minute with the top phrases being discussed now. Click these items to be shown links to tags that are associated with that word or phrase. 

Assuming this all works as described, the site functions as an automated "breaking news" service for what’s being discussed on Twitter. That’s sounds hard enough (especially considering the Twitter outages as of late), but to then expand it to scan even more sources on the web sounds like a giant undertaking.

When I tried it tonight (OK, this morning 1 AM - thanks Starbucks, for the insomnia!), the top story was Senator Kennedy’s malignant tumor - a story picked up 11 hours ago, but still being hotly discussed as of 4 minutes ago. The word "malignant" also appeared in the sidebar linked to "brain," "senator," "tumor," "kennedy," and "malignant." I have to admit, I haven’t watched anything but a few minutes of local TV news for the past few days, so I don’t know how "old" or "fresh" this story really is, but on Google News, I found stories on this as old as 8 hours ago, and as recent as 31 minutes ago. Since Intwition picked up the story 11 hours ago, that sounds like they may have been faster than traditional media. However, I’ll need to watch this for much longer than a few minutes to know for sure that this is the case.

What’s really cool about the service is that you don’t have to visit the site to get the scoop on what’s being discussed - you have the option to subscribe to the Intwition RSS feed . You can also follow them on Twitter, but it doesn’t appear that the stories are being posted there - it’s more of a "what’s up with the service" thing there (bummer).

Can Intwition help change the way we hear about news? Only time will tell, but it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Mobile reminder service kwiry, which I covered here, is running a pretty cool promo right now. If you’re using kwiry, then anytime you send in a kwiry for a specific book, movie, or music (song or album), you’re automatically entered in a contest to win that very item.

The more you send, the more chances to win. Just include one of these words - book, movie, or music - along with the title of the item.

Example: Spiderman 3 Movie 

You can enter as many times as you want with different books, movies and music, but you can’t repeat the same title within a week.

More details can be found here: http://blog.kwiry.com/announcing-its-on-us-once-a-week-36/

Brijit is an online community that offers up the world’s best long-form content by boiling it down to 100 word abstracts. You can then peruse the abstracts to determine what you what to read, listen to, or watch. The sources Brijit pulls from can be stories, like magazine articles, but they can also be radio or video shows, too. The summaries are sorted into 15 different subject areas like Politics, Entertainment, Science & Tech, Travel, Home, etc., each with their own RSS feed. Brijit’s list of sources is even larger, pulling in articles from popular print media like Sports Illustrated, National Geographic, The Economist, Marie Claire, GQ, Conde Nast Traveler, Details, BusinessWeek, and so many more. You can get involved at Brijit by writing abstracts for them. If yours is chosen, you earn $5 (or $8 for an audio/video source like a TV program. See, I was right - people do read, they are just doing it online. Awesomeness.

A service called Awesome Highlighter lets you markup web sites by highlighting text on the pages. You can choose from four different highlighter colors: yellow, blue, green, or red. The highlighted pages can then be saved to your account or shared with friends using a TinyURL-like shortened URL. You can use the service by going to the website or by using the Firefox extension. Pages can be sent to your Twitter account, too.

Although this may not be something that’s useful for everyone, I can see its benefit for team collaboration or even in an educational setting, where students share web notes with each other, or teachers share marked up pages with their class.

(via downloadsquad)

When I first heard about this service, I had to wonder if it could even be for real: the new online storage site, ADrive is claiming to offer 50 GB of FREE online storage. When something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. According to Web Worker Daily, there is a catch to using the service, actually, there are a few: "their required registration includes your full address and phone number, their uploader is a java tool, and they reserve the right to share metadata about your files with partners - which implies context-sensitive advertising in the future."

It sounds just a tad invasive…I’m happier with the free, no-strings attached 5 GB from SkyDrive instead.

For a service that’s primarily used by Crackberry-addicted professionals, it sure did take LinkedIn a long time to launch a mobile version, but one has finally arrived. The multilanguage WAP version of LinkedIn can be found by going to m.linkedin.com on your phone’s mobile browser. This scaled down version offers search, the ability to view your profile, and the ability to view your contacts and updates. From your phone you can invite other members and forward job postings. Still in the works is the ability to reply to job postings or update your own profile.

Oh and by the way, despite all the blogs covering this new mobile site with pictures of how great it looks on a iPhone, let’s get real - corporate users don’t use iPhones for business (their IT Net Admins forbid it!), it’s more likely that the way most users will see looks more like the image here (borrowed from Webware), kudos to them for a realistic screenshot.

If you have ever sent someone a link and really needed to know if they ever clicked it, a new service from LinkBlip can help out. To use LinkBlip, you just enter your email address and the URL you want people to click. LinkBlip will create a shortened URL (like TinyURL does) that you can then send and share with anyone. When your link is clicked, you’ll get an email. You will also be given a link to their site where more stats, like how many times people have clicked on your link, are listed.

In other link news, LinkBunch smooshes a bunch of links into only shortened URL, great for consolidated lots of links into one. Clean up your favorites!

Worried you have a nasty bug? Not sure if your anti-virus software is up-to-date? (Shame, shame!) A free service from NanoScan will instantly scan your PC for viruses. The service provides an “instant” scanner that searches for viruses, spyware and other threats. It can detect, in less than a minute, a huge number of threats that could be running on your PC right now. NanoScan’s detection capacity is mainly due to the new Anti-malware Collective Intelligence, a system developed by Panda Research and hosted on a network of data centers. If any badware is found on your PC, you’ll have to find other means to actually eliminate it, but the service will at least give you peace of mind as to whether or not your system is clean.