Journals update

Hi folks,
We updated Journals today with
a couple of user facing enhancements and some backend
changes.
1) Additional moods for your entry. This is available
for all English speaking locales (US, UK, CA) and Latino.
2)
A new link called What's Hot.
2) OpenID support for
comments.

So, we finally got around to putting in
more moods so you can better express your state of mind
:)

The What's Hot link is a
product of AOL called Mgnet (pronounced Magnet). This is an intelligent
recommendation engine that brings you stories/articles that you
like.  You just have to  seed it with some starting
points which are as easy as clicking on some pictures to indicate the
kind of articles you like to read. The engine then learns from your
choices and brings you more of what you like. The more you use it, the
better it gets. Please give it a try.
These guys sit next to our team and they
would welcome any feedback you may have.


As I had mentioned previously,
you can now use your OpenID to post comments to an entry. The promise
of OpenID is to be able to use a single user name and password to
sign-in across the web (that is, wherever OpenID is
supported).  The OpenID provider (AOL, myopenid.com,
blogger.com) will validate your credentials and you will be redirected
back to the web site where you came from.

A good web
site to try this on, would be livejournal.com.
LiveJournal has a sign-in link for OpenID at the top right of the page.
If you click that link you will be asked to enter your
OpenID.  In the box enter this url "http://openid.aol.com/YourScreenName"
(your screen name and without the quotes). Be sure you put in your
screen name. In my case I would put in
"http://openid.aol.com/vishy2004". You
will then be redirected to the AOL sign-in page where you will be asked
to authenticate. After successfully signing in, you will be sent back
to the LiveJournal page. Now you are signed in to LiveJournal using
your OpenID.

Similarly,
a Blogger user who wants to leave a comment, will be challenged with
the AOL sign-in screen. On that page they will notice a tab for OpenID
(the orange color tab on the far right). When the Blogger user clicks
on the OpenID tab, they will be asked to enter their OpenID. For
Blogger users their OpenID would be of the form
YourBlogName.blogspot.com (for example, one of my test blogs on blogger
is journalsopenid.blogspot.com). Once you enter this information, you
will be taken to the Bloggger sign-in screen where your credentials
will be validated. After successful validation, you will be be sent
back to AOL where you will have to fill out a small form where you will
be asked a couple of questions, one of which is your age (this is to
comply with Child Protection laws). Upon filling out this form
successfully (only a one time thing), you will go to the Comments page
where you can leave a comment.

For this update,
OpenID for comments is available for US journals
only.

More on
OpenID
AOL is an OpenID provider, in that, if you
have an AOL or AIM screen name you automatically get an OpenID. For
example, my OpenID would be http://openid.aol.com/vishy2004. In
fact your OpenID could be your journal name (in my case it would be
http://journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke).
It can also be an abbreviation of your journal name like
http://journals.aol.com/journalseditor.
So, whereever it asks for an OpenID you can enter any one of the 3
options I mentioned above.
For more on OpenID click here.

Please give this a try
and let me know if you have any
issues.