We all have a DigiCam and we keep clicking almost every moment of our lives. And then, we upload them to photo sharing sites so as to share with our friends & family. While sharing your photos online please keep the following in mind.

• It’s your personal life. Don’t make it too public.

• Understand that the potential viewers of the photos are not only those who invite, but includes anyone searching the Internet.
• So, whenever you share personal or sensitive photos, make sure you mark them as PRIVATE or PROTECTED. That is, just make sure that, the photos could be viewed only by those who invite.
• NEVER upload your images where you have no control over the display/accessibility/management of your uploaded photos.
• Use only quality services to upload like Flickr, PhotoBucket, PicasaWeb etc.
  

Keep these things in mind and protect your privacy online.
Have you been following these guidelines? Or have you had any experience where, leaving your images public caused you some sort of trouble? What’s your opinion about the billions of images being uploaded to the internet?

I woke up today morning to see Orkut introduced facebook-like Social Apps for Indians. This has been announced months back and they first released it to “Estonians” some months back. It’s great news that Orkut has launched the feature to Indian’s too (at second rank after Brazil).

There is a banner in your “Home” page to notice you of the addition:

You can access and manage the apps at MyApps page which can be accessed from your Home page (Right under the profile picture).

Currently, there are 18 apps available for Indians to add to their profile. They include Games, Music, Movie Ratings & Reviews, Photo-related ones etc. You can have the full list of available apps in your MyApps page.

You can have music in your profile, a slideshow, Favorite Movies’ reviews etc..

Once added, the apps will be shown at the bottom of your profile page.

A screenshot of an app, i just tried out:

These newly-launched apps are sure to create a wave among the Indian Youth. We will see more Orkutting.

Most of these apps, are granted “root-level” access to your profile on adding. Since, every single app is tested and approved by Orkut before publishing, security is assured (at least for the time being!!).

(It was just last week, Orkut launched Orkut Mobile Version & Orkut Low-Bandwidth Version. Good going!!!)

You would’ve read my first ever scoop which was on ImageShack launching a new Torrent Service. I blogged it on 30th March and till then a search for “imageshack torrent” showed up nothing in google. After few hours, my post was the only one about the launch, listed in the google search for “imageshack torrent”. The post raked in 6700+ views in just 6 days. It made me (a newbie blogger) feel great.

A guy named, baramunchies (http://digg.com/users/baramunchies) submitted the article to Digg and at the time of writing this, my post has a total of 22 Diggs.

Today, I googled “imageshack torrent” and the results were all on the “launch of New Torrent Service From ImageShack”. Almost all posts were made on or after 5th April. The search result showed the p2p-news-giant, TorrentFreak (acclaimed of reporting latest scoops), in the 6th slot with their post dated 5th April.

Even then, their post was digged a whopping 990 times (as at 23.00 IST, 6th April) just in a single day.
Remember, the SCOOPer got only 22 diggs in 7 days.

Yes, I KNEW that TorrentFreak is among the 50 most popular domains featured on the frontpage of Digg.
And now I KNOW a SCOOP is NOT a SCOOP, unless you are that reputed.

What do you say?
(P.S. I was not complaining. The AIM OF THIS POST is to explain, how important is a solid reputation for your blog to be read & digged)

This needs attention. Imageshack.us, the leader in image hosting, today added a great new feature to their ‘already-nice’ feature-set: “Online Torrenting”.

What Is It?

It’s a cutting-edge technology by which you can download the contents of a torrent file to imageshack.us’s clustered servers and download it to your computer through direct links.

That means, you literally need no torrent clients or p2p clients running in the background, hogging your resources. Just add the torrent file at imageshack and let them do the torrenting for you. And, once it’s finished you can download the files as direct links. Sounds great, isn’t it !!!

Specs

You get 15GB Storage Space & 15GB Bandwidth

How To?

1. The service is still in the early BETA and requires you to register for an account at imageshack.us
2. After Registering, LogIn and Go to Imageshack Torrents’ Home.
3. You can either upload a .torrent file from your computer or else provide the URL to the .torrent file. Click GO
4. That’s it. Now, Imageshack starts torrenting for you and you may shut the computer and have a good night’s sleep.
   Nothing is downloaded to your computer, NOW.
5. When you check back, it might be finished or else you can see the status of the given torrent download.
6. In the torrents’ homepage, you get to control torrenting, like, Start, Stop, Download, Delete etc. (screenshot below)
7. Clicking on “Download” will take you to a file listing page. (screenshot below)
8. If you are downloading a torrent with many sub-files, you can download the individual files in the order of finishing. That means, if your torrent contains 50 files and only 25 of them are finished at the time you check, you can download those 25 files individually while the torrenting proceeds in the background.

You might’ve used BitLet, which allow you to download the torrent files to your computer without a torrent client. But, Imageshack has gone one more step ahead, and downloads it to their servers to provide you with DIRECT LINKS.

Screenshots

Showing Status of torrents

(This one facilitates HTTP downloading of Torrents!!)
What do you think about this cool, new service?

NB: My dear readers have reported that wixi.com has pulled down the offer. If you came here looking for a free unlimited account, I’m sorry, you’re a bit late. But, they offer 3GB storage for free accounts, which is pretty decent.

You would’ve probably heard about some Free Online Storage Providers. If you haven’t already, you may want to take a look at them. (Zshare and box.net are only some of them).

Let me introduce to you, a new service that literally allows you to create and manage an Online Media Center >> wixi.com. They have both FREE and PREMIUM plans with a storage limit for the FREE plan. I know you love to have unlimited storage for all your precious-media-files. So, at the end of this post, I’ll share with you, a link to a special offer to create a PREMIUM account with unlimited storage. Read On..

wixi.com could be transformed into an efficient and ultimate Online Media Center (as they call it).

It’s a ” new cool way to organize, mix and share all your songs, photos and videos. Enjoy a unique drag & drop, click & play experience!”

Yes. As you would’ve probably guessed, the service is fully AJAX-ed. You will be given a public page with a custom URL to share your public media. It supports embedding and thus you can have the videos you uploaded there, playing right there in your blog/site/profile. wixi has an awesome mobile version designed primarily for the iPhone too. And you wanna’ have some chat out there, an active forum awaits you.

The FREE version has limitations on storage capacity and bandwidth, whereas, the PREMIUM version gives you UNLIMITED storage and bandwidth. The site is still in BETA and the signup is invitation-based. But, here is a link that i found in their site, which allows you to create a PREMIUM account (i.e.Unlimited Storage)for FREE. I’ve already joined there and the service is pretty cool. So, jump in, Create Your Free (PREMIUM) Online Media Center.
This is a limited-period offer; so rush in.

Have you been to wixi? What do you have to say about it?

It’s been a long wait. New top level domain “.asia” is now open for public registration. The “Go Live!” was on March 26th, i.e. anyone can register an ‘.asia’ domain for themselves.

“With over 10 million domains registered in China alone and over 150 million worldwide, the potential for .Asia is only now starting to be realized. There are millions of great .Asia domains still available on a first-come-first-served basis,” says Edmon Chung, CEO of DotAsia.

Among the first to recognize the value of .Asia is Hong Kong Cyberport, who announced today the launch of “www.Cyberport.asia”.

The .asia launch programme received wide appreciation and is said to “pave the way and set a new benchmark for future top-level-domain launches”.

How Can I Get One?

You have to go to an ICANN accredited registrar to get your .asia domain name registered. You can have the list of accredited registrars here.

Pricing

The prices are now a bit high as compared to other top level domains. However, GoDaddy is offering them on a competitive price of about Rs.800/- per year. ($20.00). That seems a lower figure when compared to other registrars’ pricing of about Rs.1500/- per year etc.

In total, .asia is having a great time ahead for sure. If you are planning to have one for yourself, make it fast.
If you register one, feel free to drop a line as a comment.

(Know more about .asia OR domain names)

The event is Singularity08 and I am Singularity.

Left wondering? I am talking about the first large-scale online web conference in the world, Singularity 2008.

What Is It?
It’s a seminal web event intended to form a time capsule or snapshot of Web ’08 . The conference will have experts in WebDesign & Blogging, Artists, 3D & Flash Developers, Gods of JavaScript & MarkUps, Hackers, Entrepreneurs; conducting sessions on various topics.

When Is It?
It is a 3-day event that is to be held during October 24-26th, 2008

Where Is It?
On the Web. It’s all happening right here. It works on Streaming Technology.

Who Is Organizing It?
It is organized by Aral Balkan (speaker, consultant, developer, know abt him ) Kudos to him!!

How Can You Be Singularity ?
It will be a paid event (Aral has promised to keep it as affordable as possible). But, “after an exclusive period for attendees, we will be releasing the sessions under a CreativeCommons license so that everyone can access the material” -Aral said. (That’s Great).

The idea is for it to become a time capsule of sorts: What this group of passionate thought leaders think, was exciting about Web ‘08. I feel it will be a very valuable contribution to the commons.

-Aral said in a private mail to me. ( I am very proud to have talked to him).