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The Q&A site Quora has rolled out a new feature: the ability to upload a photo to accompany your posts.

Developer Ben Newman added a post this afternoon titled "Something new that you can do," featuring a large photograph. His post, first spotted by The Next Web, was received with a flurry of excitement, although Newman says it's a "work in progress."

LinguaSys has launched its TransGen Mobile app today, promising the first multilingual private mobile chat rooms for Android clients. Rather than just a personal translation service, this app will allow groups to participate in real-time chat, even if they speak multiple languages.

The Android app offers private persistent chat rooms of up to 500 users per room. The app also offers a personal translation option when not in a chat room. But as the need to communicate globally is increasingly real-time, it's the ability to chat that makes the app useful.

Although it's been a short Week, the tin horns have blessed us all by generating enough Online Tyranny to justify a new post. Well, let's get to it, shall we?

Vietnamese blogger charged with trying to "topple the government." Pham Minh Hoang, member of an opposition party in Vietnam, has been arrested. A member of the Viet Tan party, Hoang is a college professor in Ho Chi Minh City. He was arrested for talking about democracy, corruption and the environment, including opposing the mining of bauxite from the central highlands of the country by a Chinese concern.

He is charged, however, with "activities aimed at overthrowing the government." A Christian pastor and two others from the opposition party have been arrested. Hoang's arrest was done furtively, with initially no announcement of detention, which is contrary to Vietnamese law. A petition has been created urging the Vietnamese government to free Hoang, and his three associates.

Approximately 2.5 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook every month and 1.2 million photos are served up every second - statistics that point to the importance of Facebook as a site for sharing pictures. And although the emphasis has been on sharing, it hasn't been necessarily on the quality of photos shared.

Today, Facebook begins rolling out several improvements to Photos that will make the site much better for sharing high-quality photos. The new features include some UI changes to make browsing and uploading easier, as well as upping the pixel size for photos so that Facebook can handle higher resolution images.

Curation is currently one of "the chosen" buzz words in the social media zeitgeist (that's another). But as abundant as the talk of curation is, actual curation tools have been in relatively short order.

In recent weeks, I've been experimenting with some newly released curation platforms. The first, Curated.by, lets you capture tweets around a specific topic using a plug-in that's installed on your Twitter.com profile. You can then easily tag and sort tweets into "bundles," which can then be embedded in a blog post for some additional context to whatever you're reporting on.

There was an interesting article recently in The Wall Street Journal by Isacc Arnsdorf that discussed how art gallery and museum patrons are studied as they move through art exhibits. The objective is simple: measure how people navigate through and engage with the art. When I read the article, I immediately thought of some of the things that we're doing at MindTouch, but really there's a broader lesson to be learned here.

Google's URL shortener Goo.gl has launched its open service and companion website to the public this afternoon. The service looks a whole lot like upstart innovator Bit.ly.

"I guess Oscar Wilde was right, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery," Bit.ly's John Borthwick told us in response. "They took all the basic features and copied from bit.ly." That is true for the user interface, but in the larger context of both companies' offerings, there are significant differences.

Mozilla, home of the popular Firefox browser, has announced a new effort to challenge the dominance of Adobe Flash in the casual gaming market. Called Game On 2010, the effort is an international competition that will highlight "games built, delivered and played on the open Web and the browser." The crux of the issue is no Flash allowed.

Critics of Flash argue that it's subject to too much proprietary control and is too inefficient in its use of system resources. Fans of the format point out that a huge proportion of online video and casual gaming goes on in Flash. Is a browser without Flash support (like Safari in iOS) a broken browser? Contests like Game On 2010 aim to prove that browsers can do incredible things without Adobe. We'll see.

We have seen Babylonian language, whether we recognized it as such or not. It's that stuff on every ancient tablet in every adventure movie you've ever seen that doesn't have a crane or a guy dancing (that, scientifically speaking, is Egyptian). The writing system, quite possibly the first humans devised, consists of lines and wedges. The language itself, however, has lain silent for 2,000 years. Now it speaks again.

The language, also known as Akkadian, was reconstructed by a group of scholars from Cambridge University headed by Dr. Martin Worthington. In order to uncover the secrets of the language's sounds, the group studied letter combinations and patterns internal to the written language and compared it to transcriptions into other, better known ancient languages.

It has long been said that "the clothes make the man," and if that man is on the cutting edge of technology, he's probably an iPad owner. So what better way for the fashionable male of 2010 to properly outfit himself than by designing his own dress shirts on an iPad? This is what international startup Blank Label hopes will happen thanks to the release of it's iPad app - the first mobile app from the facilitators of online dress shirt customization.