Traffic to the popular micro-blogging site Twitter has already more than trebled just this year, according to web analysts HitWise. Twitter now ranks as 7th within the Social Networking category, up from 23rd just 3 weeks ago!

The amazing increase follows the media attention generated by the likes of Stephen Fry (owner of the world’s second favourite Twitter feed after Barack Obama) and Jonathon Ross. However, Twitter still has a long way to catch up with FaceBook and YouTube, which together account for nearly 60% of social networking visits.

Twitter hasn’t quite achieved world domination yet, with less than one per cent of all social networking traffic, but it’s growing at an exponential rate: Over the last 12 months traffic to Twitter.com has increased 27 fold. However, the service is probably even more popular than the numbers imply – If the people accessing their Twitter accounts via mobile phones and third party applications (such as Twitterrific, Twitterfeed and Tweetdeck) were included, the numbers would be even higher.

You can follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/wisecat2

See what’s happening – right now – on Twitter, with Twitter Search
#UKSnow is the hot topic of the moment.
It’s also interesting that Stephen Fry is the 3rd most followed Twitter user in the world! The top 10.000 most followed Twitter users
Twitter has increased its traffic 10-fold over the last year and is now the 18th most visited social site.

If anything were to happen to your system like a house fire or flood, you would lose all of your valuable data. A new online storage solution called Jungle Disk has a simple pricing model of just $0.15 per gigabyte of data transfer. The data is stored by Amazon’s S3 service so you can trust it will be safe and secure.

Other features include an automatic back option along with a shared network drive solution plus options for businesses. It’s got a lot of other useful options too. You could use it to synchronize your personal laptop with you desktop, for example.

I’ve been testing out this service for the last few weeks to backup my important files, and so far it’s been very reliable. Recommended!

Kosmix is the latest search engine on the block, attempting to challenge Google. But it has a much more interesting interface than Google, looking more like a personal homepage than a search engine.

On the home page you can see the most popular stories from sites such as Yahoo, Digg and CNN, the most popular videos from places like YouTube and Himeo and daily pictures from Flickr and Kodak. You can also see the hottest searches in Kosmos, plus trending topics and top links from Twitter.

Try doing a search, and it brings up results from Wikipedia, Google and dozens of other sources from across the Web.

This is definitely one site to keep an eye on. Check out what’s going on behind the scenes with the fascinating Kosmix Blog. Here you can read about how the site developed, what they are thinking about now, and their innovative plans for the future.

Storing your valuable data online gives you easy access to it, in the event of disaster and, even more usefully, lets you retrieve your files remotely from any location.
Here are the top three online backup services, based on the amount of free storage available:

50 GB – available at www.adrive.com
25 GB – available at skydrive.live.com
10 GB – available at www.humyo.com

FindHow is a new ‘how-to’ site that offers quality instructions on thousands of topics. It’s different to other ‘how-to’ sites because it links to the most relevant advice from other sources, rather than providing its own. This makes it a kind of “educational search engine”, gathering expert advice from around the Web on all kinds of topics.

Some popular how-to’s include: How to lose weight, How to plan a budget, How to organize a closet, How to select life insurance, and How to create an estate plan.

Other offbeat how-to’s include such things as How to outrun a crocodile and How to treat someone who’s been struck by lightning.

Google Notebook is a very versatile tool that lets you browse, clip, and organize information from across the web in a single online location that’s accessible from any computer.

Just highlight what you want (including images), right-click it and select Note This. It will then be transferred to your notebook alongside the rest of your clippings.

You can also use it to store ideas, thoughts, notes, and bookmarks. Google Notebook now supports labels, making it a powerful organizer for all your information.

How do you get started? Simple. (more…)

Cambridge-based True Knowledge, is a new search engine that gives “direct answers to human and machine questions”, rather than a list of statistically relevant links.

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