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It's not often that I get excited about software these days but after the loss of a laptop drive over the holiday season, I was forced to reexamine my backup strategy which, up to that point, had been simply plugging in an external USB drive from time to time and using Apple's Time Machine to grab a snapshot of the contents of my drive.

Needless to say, I was caught out by a busy schedule and ended up losing about a week's worth of photos because I had forgotten to plug the drive in after a previous shooting session. As a result, I started to look for something to complement Time Machine and spent some time looking at the consumer offering from the folks at Crashplan.com.

While Twitter itself offers very little statistical feedback on their services, there are a variety of sites now tracking tweeting frequency, tweeting patterns, follower growth, etc. on Twitter. Here are just a few:

- twittercounter.com
- tweetrush.com
- tweetstats.com

Additional interesting ones that I've recently found:

- twitter-friends.com
- tweetvalue.com

Lastly, there are some sites now popping up that supplement Twitter's basic feature set with additional functionality:

- futuretweets.com

Feel free to add to the list of other ones that might be of interest!

Cerego, parent company of iKnow! had a big break earlier this week when they presented at DEMOFall 08 amongst a crowd of other developers. Billed as the first "intelligent social learning platform", the press release from Cerego says:

iKnow! empowers people to learn faster, remember longer, and manage their memory for a lifetime. iKnow!'s patented learning algorithms generate personalized learning schedules that improve the absorption and recall of chunks of learning content called "items." The algorithms are based on decades of research on optimum learning patterns in the fields of cognitive science and neuroscience. The end result is deeper learning at a faster pace.

Read on to watch their presentation online or cast a vote and vote for Cerego for DEMOFall08's "Best of Show" award.