I just heard about LibraryFind, a federated search tool for libraries, written in Rails. I probably won't run out and replace the (also Rails-powered, in part) federated search tool that we have, but it is great to hear about other tools out there.
A couple of interesting things here:
* It is open source -- a very nice feature considering that many commercial products can be fairly pricey.
* The authors seem to emphasize ease-of-use with their "Two clicks - one click to find, one click to get" mantra. The commerical products I've seen tend to be *way* too complicated for most end users. That's a big reason why we rolled our own solution...
If you think you may be interested in scaling a web site/app, you could do worse than heading over to Peter Van Dijck's site and reading his recent post on the subject. Peter basically gathered slides from a number of presentations on the subject, along with some useful-looking links. Enjoy!
TechCrunch recently mentioned that Mozy now has a mac version. And, one of the commenters pointed out another interesting-looking service, CrashPlan. My S3 setup seems to be working well for now, but it is nice to see a few more mac-friendly options appear in the automatic backup market.