More than anything, Springnote is being featured in Launchpad. Yes, we've been around for a while, but this is the first time we'll be making a public entrace to the rest of the world. We'll also be hosting a booth at the Expo, so feel free to come by and talk to us--about anything!

openmaru members are travelling as tech experts to participate in many of the sessions. ChangShin Lee will be giving a talk "Trinity for Evolution from Closed Service to Open Platform". (I don't need to remind you of our mission for "open platforms", any more, right? :) We'll also be participating in many of the sessions, including the ones on Ruby on Rails, on which many of our products are built, and a session on OpenID.

What's unique about us going to Japan for the conference is that this isn't just about us doing marketing for our products as we will be reporting from Japan to the rest of the world how far Web 2.0 has come. We'll be travelling with some of the most renowned bloggers in Korea as blogging journalists. One of them is Danny Kim. Danny is actually responsible for writing many of the posts for this blog; he's our blog marketing agent. He is also well known for his TechnoKimchi blog, which covers the digital tech and culture in Korea. You'll be able to hear much about what's going on during the conference through this blog as well as his TechnoKimchi blog.

Excitement is our motto for this year and the Expo will only make it more visible. We're excited not only to meet you all there, but also to learn about the Web 2.0 landscape is like in Asia, esp. Japan.

So, see you all soon!

p.s. You can find an excellent coverage of Springnote on Read/WriteWeb. It talks about what's cool about Springnote and what more we need to work on. It's always very nice to hear what others think about our product. We've been very closely listening to what everyone has to say about us--including myID and Springnote. And how rewarding it has been! More details on this to follow in the next article :)

• Very easy and intuitive editor
• OpenID authentication & email invitation
• Supports web standards such as XHTML
• Access anywhere with any modern web browser
• Unlimited text storage and 2 GB file storage
• Compatible with txt, doc, html, and other files
• Publishable on other blogs
• Private or public page viewing
• Open API for extension and integration
• Open source for EditorXquared

Still not fully getting it? I'm sure this video will help you muchos.
But more than anything, we strongly recommend you to join the service and try it out. It's OpenID-enabled, so you can use any OpenID account of yours; or if you don't have one yet, we also have myID, an OpenID service provided by openmaru, ready for you :)

So, why don't you hop in? I guarantee you it's going to be an amazing experience!

As you guys all probably know, Bloglines is one of the the leading online RSS readers. Many of us here at openmaru also use Bloglines for catching up with blogs and news. Of course, we’ve been loving it even more ever since the upgrade. :)

Anyhow, the news of the day is this: Bloglines now supports OpenID. That’s, in fact, real good news. OpenID is something whose value increases exponentially if it’s supported by major applications. Now, we’ve got one of THE major web applications joining the band, we can maybe even happily expect other services to start jumping in as well.

You don’t have an OpenID account yet? You can so easily create one simply by visiting our OpenID service: myID.net. We provide many great services as an OpenID provider.

But wait! We have one more “major” service coming tomorrow. It’s openmaru’s service called Springnote. Yes, its English version is finally live! More on this fascinating service tomorrow!

What amazed and amused us even more was that MyID has been listed as one of the OpenID providers on the site. Awesome!

When we came across this article, we were like "Yes! Yes! Yes!" because that's exactly what we are trying to do here at openmaru: Give rights back to users!

We've always believed in the open Web, open social networks, open media, and open platforms, so to see an article written by big names like Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington, was definitely a huge encouragement.

Here's the list of rights users must have:

• Ownership of their own personal information, including:
  • their own profile data
    the list of people they are connected to
  • the activity stream of content they create;
• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Also, the sites supporting these rights shall:

• Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
• Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
• Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
• Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

That's where myID nicely can come in. Being an OpenID provider, it creates a great way for users to move their identity data around. But, we don't stop there. We also enable our users to move their contact list around. We also have a series of features to be added as time goes on, all in sync with the lists above.

The "four-fathers" of the bill of rights deeply understand the value of the open Web. We are trying to push hard in the same direction as well.

That's what gets us excited. This is the Web IN THE MAKING. And we, as in everyone, are the makers.

Of course, having a sip of what this Web will be a great starting point. Wouldn't it? ;)

As part of our ongoing effort to make myID.net user-friendly and user-accessible, we’ve come up with few brilliant ideas and features that’ll greatly help you in use of myID.net The first one of them is Bookmarklets.

As you know bookmarklets are small browser functions that allow you to bookmark pages or features. With myID bookmarklets, we essentially provide two functions.

First one is for bookmarking all your friends OpenID’s. It’s quite difficult and tedious to write them all down to manage them. With myID bookmarklets, you can simply drag and drop the contact list button into your browser. And then you can press the button to add your friends' OpenID’s into your own contact list every time you see it. It's just like how you bookmark pages on del.icio.us. The second bookmarklet allows your browser to auto-complete your own OpenID when you sign in to services just by clicking on the bookmarklet, saving much of time and effort. 

Both bookmarklets are browser-dependent, but still very easy to deploy. You can find out more details on how to use them on the tools & tips page.

Here's the screencast of how to use bookmarklets. Look how easy bookmarklets are to use!

Yes, we’re not more a mere OpenID provider service. We also go into the ID consumer side as well. It’s pretty simple. We create services that are valuable to every day users and customers. We’re all about people and bringing values to them. Bookmarklets are only snippets of what we want to do. In the next post, we’ll explain one of our most convenient features in contact list import features.