ThinkUp – helps you improve your use of social

ThinkUp

ThinkUp is a great little service for anyone who likes to track how they are doing on the social sites Twitter and Facebook.

Rather than relying on some arbitrary grading system like Klout, ThinkUp instead provides simple, clear feedback on what you are doing online and how people are responding to it.

There’s a web interface where you can log in and check out the insights ThinkUp has to share with you, or you can just rely on the helpful daily email.

Here are some examples of the feedback ThinkUp provides (click to enlarge them):

thinkup2

thinkup1

There’s value in ThinkUp for everyone, but I think particularly for people in leadership positions in organisations who are just getting started with a tool like Twitter, ThinkUp can act as a virtual coach, providing positive advice and insight on a regular basis to keep enthusiasm levels as high as possible.

ThinkUp does cost $60 a year to use, but I think it’s good value.

 

 

Backblaze – cloud backups made easy

backblaze

I worry about backups. Do you worry about backups?

The best way to have backups is to ensure you have three copies of everything important and one of those ought to be somewhere other than where your computers are kept. These days, that means the cloud.

I have a fairly standard Seagate 3TB external hard drive connected to the somewhat old and crumbly iMac on my desk. This machine worries me more than any, largely because it has our archive of family digital photos on it, going back some ten years. I use Time Machine on the mac to ensure it takes regular backups automatically, which sorts out the local copy.

For cloud backup, I chose Backblaze which is a great little cloud backup service which gives you unlimited space to backup your macs or PCs, at the remarkable cost of $5 a month per computer. It runs in the background keeping everything up to date without me needing to worry about it.

Of course a lot of my working documents are stored in Dropbox, which means I have a further copy of them. But for those big libraries of thousands of priceless digital photos, the combination of automated local backup to a hard disk and the cloud storage offered by Backblaze seems to be working ok for me.

Steve Jobs in 1983

Fasincating listening.

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