Divvyshot has taken a somewhat different approach to photo sharing where albums are thought of as events, and multiple people can easily contribute to them. Imagine a wedding where there will probably be lots of cameras and people taking photographs. Now imagine that everyone upload their photos to the same Divvyshot event, where all photos easily can be downloaded and shared. It is a very simple way to gather all photos in one place, even for non-techies.

If you are familiar with other photo sharing sites like Flickr, you will most immediately spot quite a few differences. The first thing you will notice is the website itself, with its simple and grey theme, yet stays very stylish and functional. All actions have icons with no visible labels, although they show descriptions on mouse over. It might not be completely user friendly, but you get the hang of all buttons after a while.

Nice features like directly importing photos from Flickr are done very well and work great most of the time. There are sharing features, where one can send photos to Flickr, Facebook and link to Twitter. It is also possible to download all photos in one click, which is very handy in the wedding example above.

So will I switch over to Divvyshot from Flickr? In short, no. A longer answer is that Flickr has a huge community, thousands of external apps, an API, integration with Aperture and Lightroom. I will however try it out on my parents and other people who might find Flickr too daunting but still want to easily share photos with friends and family.

Have a look at my Divvyshot account for sample albums.

Another way of looking at online identities is the concept of one central hub – you. Think of it as your “home”, a place for your identity. This identity could then be used to authenticate you on any supported site, without requiring a password or even a username, provided that all required information has been entered into the central hub profile beforehand, such as your full name and username.

This is exactly how OpenID works! It acts as a central hub for your online identity and lets you login to all OpenID enabled websites without having to come up with a new password each time (or worse, use the same password). What makes OpenID work is simplicity; it is not that hard to grasp or explain the concept of an online identity hub and using an URL to identify yourself with.

A huge benefit of OpenID is that it is completely decentralized. This basically means that anyone can set up their own OpenID provider, and there are already lots of open libraries available to make this as painless as possible. This means that if you don’t trust anyone to hold your personal identity, just get a domain name and set one up for yourself, and use any type of authentication you want to identify yourself to your own hub. You can even use X509 certificates or OTP for this purpose if you want.

As for security, make sure to use HTTPS for the provider to protect against man-in-the-middle and replay attacks. The other important security issue are phishing attacks, where users would enter their credentials on a third-party server instead of their own. Using client certificates or making it mandatory to already be logged in before executing a request would however make this a non-issue. Other than that, the ordinary web problems remain, such as bugs in the OpenID libraries and other attack vectors.

If one would be able to gain access to your OpenID provider, he would have access to all authenticated sites. To put this in context however, look at your email account. If one were to gain access to your email, he would undoubtedly have means to access most of your sites anyway because of the password recovery feature.

Chances are that you already have an OpenID identity without even knowing! Lots of big websites provide this service, and it is even possible to roll you own as mentioned above, or even install a plugin for you very own WordPress blog to enable this feature. If you have your own fancy domain but no means to setup an OpenID provider, fear not, there is support for delegation, meaning that you can delegate the authentication to another provider, while still providing your own domain for authentication to the target website.

I’ll just save it and read it later…

It’s not easy to manage all these links and texts without any kind of system. This is where Instapaper comes in.

Instapaper is best used from a bookmarklet in your browser. It can be used both on a computer and a mobile platform such as an iPhone. It could look something like this:

It’s very easy to add a site to the reading list. Just navigate to the page, click on the Read Later bookmarklet and boom! To view the reading list and to actually read the articles, there is of course a website which looks something like the following. It has an archive for read items, and it has the ability to extract just the essential text from the websites.

I find the site best used as the Home Page of the browser. This way you see the reading list as a reminder everytime a new browser window is started.

If you have an iPhone, you will get a bonus! There is an app in the App Store which syncs with Instapaper on the web and makes it easy to manage and read items in the list.

The Instapaper iPhone app website has more information on how to use it.

[Instapaper] [iPhone App]

Just click the link and accept the agreement. It basically states:

• Everybody on your account is using their full email address only to check and send email with their mail client.
• Everybody is only ftping/sshing to your domain, and not a server name directly.
• Nobody on your account is using .procmail or .forward files.
• You don’t have /home/.SOMETHING/username anywhere in your files at all… you should change it to just: /home/username

If you choose to accept, you will be placed in queue to be moved to their new server environment, and will immediately receive unlimited bandwidth and disk space!

Should you choose to register a new Dreamhost account, use promo code JOCH1 to get $40 off on your hosting.

Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects.

An article may look like the following, which is a guide on how to backpack.

How to Backpack

Much like Wikipedia, it is possible to make changes or at least propose them, since it is possible to modify the permissions for the written articles.

Collaboration permissions

Support for Adsense is also built-in, which makes it possible for authors to actually make money from the content they publish on the site. If any significant amount of money will be generated by this is another question.

It is very easy to begin writing a new Knol. The interface looks like the following and features a light-weight WYSIWYG editor.

Write a new Knol

Knol might become a competitor for Wikipedia in the future, but I see it not as a competitor, more an enhancement to the online knowledge base. Since there is a real person behind each article, the contents is consistent and could be very reliable if written by a person knswledgable in the particular field.

There have been reports on the iPhone crashing when using international characters such as åäö, but it will surely be fixed soon.

I will write a review when I have the opportunity to try it myself.

If you are new to micro blogging, you should definitely have a look at Twitter in Plain English by CommonCraft. It explains the very concept and how it can be a part of your everyday life:

My favorite micro blogging platform is by far Jaiku. It has the possibility to add “chat rooms” where people can add common entries, much like a chat. It also has proper support for comments, while Twitter does not. The one thing Twitter does have is an extremely large user base, and it does as well have lots of third-party applications for easier entry of “tweets”.

Since I like using Jaiku for the innovative features, I still want to be able to be part of the large user base of Twitter. This leads to services such as Ping.FM, Socialthing and hellotxt. These services enables you to add these messages to different platforms at the same time, while only posting once!

You can add me on the following networks:

• joch@Jaiku
• johnnychadda@Twitter
• joch@Plurk

They all basically contain the same posts, except for responses and other platform specific features.

svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.6/ .

More information on how to trach WordPress using Subversion is available in their documentation.

Everything seems to be working except for is_human(), but since I’m using Akismet for the time being, there is no rush to find a replacement. There seems to be quite a few plugins available in the WordPress plugin directory though, so I have to look through them.

I have not updated yet, but will be doing it very shortly.