IBM is offering the public a peek at Bluehouse, an online office portal aimed at making it easier for employees to share documents and desktops, host web conferences, and reach out to clients from one location. Any sized business can sign up to try out the service, though not everything works at the moment. One notably cool feature is the "Live Charts," which does exactly what it sounds like. There's tagging, importing from Outlook or Lotus Notes, and a lot more to fiddle with. Bluehouse is free to use (for the moment), requires a sign-up.

Carbonite has been promoting its online backup services in Australia since May, but those activities have stepped up a notch with the launch of its full Australian Web site. Carbonite, which costs $64.95 for a 12-month subscription, is highly regarded amongst Lifehacker readers, regularly scoring kudos for its simple interface. Online backup eliminates the hassles of keeping a spare copy elsewhere, though the initial setup can have a nasty impact on your monthly download cap, and you may well need to allow a few days for the initial upload before incremental backups become possible.

Web application Oosah hosts a whopping one terabyte (that's 1,024 gigabytes) of media online for free. In addition to hosting videos, photos, and music you upload directly to the site, Oosah also integrates with Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, Facebook, and YouTube. Once you've connected your accounts, you can actually drag and drop photos between webapps—so, for example, if you uploaded a photo to Oosah that you wanted to add to a Flickr set, you can just drag and drop it onto Flickr in the sidebar. Oosah does have its limitations: Apart from hosting media only (no documents or executables here), you're limited to 200MB per video and 9MB per audio file.

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Web site Humyo offers 30GB of free online storage with a small and inconsequential catch: 25 of the 30GB must be media files, like music and videos. The remaining 5GB are reserved for non-media files and documents. Since most of our hard drive space is eaten by media, this won't likely be a problem. Once uploaded, files are organized in Humyo's user-friendly interface, which identifies filetypes and even organises media by metadata (e.g., music can be sorted through by artist, album, etc.). Humyo offers a Windows client that maps a network drive directly to your Humyo account for drag-and-drop uploads and downloads, but you can use Humyo from any platform through your browser.

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Windows only: Dexrex, a free set of plug-ins for most popular IM clients, lets you store transcripts of your IM conversations from any system online for later reference. Dexrex's plug-ins work with Digsby, Pidgin, AIM Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and many more—see the video below for a demonstration. You can even import older, locally-saved chat logs onto the site for a complete archive, or sign into chat directly through Dexrex's site, while automatically saving transcripts. Whether or not you trust your chat logs to an online storage site is up to you, of course, but it's definitely helpful if you trade a lot of links and important info through chat. Dexrex's extensions are free downloads for Windows chat clients only. Hit the jump for a video showing off some of Dexrex's features:

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Web site Uploadjockey takes the shotgun approach to uploading and sharing files on the web, sending your file to multiple file sharing services in one click. The downside of Uploadjockey is that the services it uploads to are some of the dinosaurs of the online file sharing game, like Rapidshare and Megaupload. That said, if you need that shotgun approach—say your ISP is blocking one service but may not be blocking another—it's a handy one-stop shop for sharing files up to 100MB in size. If not, you'd be better off going with one of the five best online file sharing services.

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Whether you're trying to share megabytes worth of music with a friend or send an important document to a coworker, nothing outshines a fast, easy-to-use file-sharing service. On Tuesday we asked you to share your favourite file-sharing service, and over 200 nominations later, we've rounded up the five most popular services. Hit the jump for a look at the top five, and then cast your vote for the ultimate file-sharing service.

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Once upon a time, if you wanted to access or share a file over the internet, you either had to have your own web server to upload it to or hope the file was small enough to sneak in under your email account's upload limits. Nowadays, you can upload and share gigabytes worth of data for free using a handful of web applications designed to make sharing and storing files online a breeze. We've covered gobs of them, but among all the choices, it's difficult to narrow down the competition to find the best. That's why you're here. For this week's Hive Five, we want to hear about your favourite. Hit the jump for details and to nominate your favourite online file storage and sharing application.

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Innovative file sharing service Drop.io now sends and receives faxes for free. To send a fax, just upload a document to Drop.io, enter the fax number, and click Fax. To receive a fax, Drop.io generates a cover sheet you email to the sender; as long as they use your cover page on the fax, it will end up in your Drop.io account as a PDF. Like most of Drop.io, faxing services are free and require no registration to use.

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Brilliant new file sharing web site EatLime expedites online file sharing by allowing your friends to begin downloading the file as soon as you start uploading it, meaning you don't have to wait for the file to finish uploading before they begin downloading. You can share files up to 1GB with a free registration or up to 100MB with no registration. In testing EatLime, I found that eventually—once my download caught up with my upload—I was essentially downloading in real-time from the upload, which is fantastic. If you've ever shared large files online, you know what a pain it can be in terms of time. EatLime could cut a significant chunk out of the time it takes to share files online.

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