Backup all your Online Accounts to Amazon S3, Free Until 1/31

If you have stored documents on Google Docs, you can use the built-in export feature of Google Docs to save all your documents on to the hard drive with a simple click.
Photo sharing sites like Flickr and Facebook will only let you download one photo at a time but there are third-party utilities (like FlickrDown and FotoBounce) that you may use to download all the pictures to the local drive in bulk.
The Problem
You can find similar solutions /workarounds for backing up your online data that may be residing on Twitter, Gmail, WordPress, PhotoBucket and other cloud based services.
There’re however some drawbacks with most of these “backup” solutions. First, they are all manual workarounds so you have to initiate the backup process on your own (in an ideal situation, backups should be automated). The other problem is that none of these solutions offer incremental backups (you will only want to download files from the cloud that are either new or have changed since the last backup).
The Solution
If you are looking for a simple solution that will let you backup all your online data to a central place effortlessly, check out Backify.com – this an online service that will fetch your documents, tweets, blogs, pictures, etc. from all your online accounts and will store them to Amazon S3, another cloud based storage service. Alternatively, you may also download these files to your local computer straight from Backify.
Backify works like this – you first need to associate all your different online accounts to Backify and then backups will occur automatically at frequent intervals. If you are techie, think of Backify as a web-based cron job for performing daily backups of your online accounts. It supports Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Wordpress, Blogger, Flickr, and most other popular online services.
Get Backify for Free
Backify is a commercial service and you’ll have to pay around $4/month for 2GB of storage or $5/month for a premium account that offers 10 GB of online storage space. However, the good news is that if you sign-up before January 31st, the monthly fee will be waived and you can enjoy Backify services for free.
The Backify site currently makes no mention of any limitations for free accounts but there will probably be some, at least on the storage front.
Use Your Own Amazon Account with Backify
As mentioned above, Backify uses the reliable Amazon S3 service to backup your online accounts. Alternatively, you may choose the S3 option during the sign-up process, supply your Amazon Access keys and Backify will then store your acconts data in one of your S3 buckets instead of their own.
This is useful because you can then access these files directly from the desktop using any of the S3 clients without having to use the web interface of Backify.

Amazon opens DIY Kindle publishing to world, but does not improve language support

Amazon Kindle may be the go-to brand when someone considers buying a new e-reader in the U.S., but the popular device line is still only just getting its feet wet in the international market.
Last October, Amazon released a version of the Kindle 2 that is compatible with the wireless networks in more than 100 countries, but the content available in the Kindle Store is still mostly aimed at English speakers.
Today, Amazon announced that the Kindle's do-it-yourself publishing service called Kindle Digital Text Platform (DTP) is available to publishers outside of the United States. Previously, the platform was only available to writers and publishers within the U.S.
In its announcement this morning, Amazon pointed out that DTP can offer English, German, and French-language books.
While this does open the door for more international content in the Kindle Store --an area that until now has been lagging behind-- the device remains locked into the Latin-1 ASCII alphabet, and continues to neglect the nine other ISO 8859 8-bit alphabets.

There are more than 25 languages that use the Latin-1 character set, but they are mostly Western European and American languages. Eastern European, Middle Eastern and Asian languages remain unsupported.
Furthermore, publishers of "semi-supported" languages like Dutch and Finnish will also encounter problems in DTP, since ligatures and characters not recognized as a part of the Latin-1 alphabet will not be displayed correctly in the content body. Amazon warns that "illegal characters" in the content description fields in the Kindle Store will not be automatically detected, and will simply return garbled text when viewed.
One unsupported character that stands out from the others right now is the Euro currency symbol (€).