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You can't swing a stick on the Web these days without hitting a photo or media sharing service. Some of the most popular ones like Flickr and Photobucket have become an indispensable part of our online lives. Among the most recent services to enter the game is Expono, a photo sharing, organizing and protecting service with added features like GPS tagging and the ability to connect with social media services Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed. Expono has everything you would expect to find on a media sharing site like online backup, easy sharing, albums and tagging, but adds a whole bunch more features that you might not expect all in one place. It is certainly worth taking a look at.

In September of 2008, Expono went live with its site and made the bold choice to go with 100% cloud computing. Other sites like SmugMug have done this with great success and it feels like a growing trend. The lower cost and ease of scaling made cloud computing a sensible choice for Expono and the company set about building its incredible array of features. Those features, combined with the company's talented and ambitious team based in Oslo, Norway, make Expono a potential contender in an increasingly crowded media sharing marketplace.

Earlier today we wrote about the new version of the Times Reader desktop app, notable for swapping out Microsoft's Silverlight technology for Adobe's AIR platform - a significant win for Adobe over its RIA (Rich Internet Apps) rival. The New York Times has followed up by debuting another online news reading product. This one is called Times Wire and it aims to be a real time 'river of news', taking a large leaf from the book of Twitter and Friendfeed. The site is described as "a new layout of New York Times news in reserve chronological order." It updates every minute with the latest news and blog posts from across NYTimes.com.

The New York Times launched a new version of its Times Reader desktop application today. The Times Reader allows users to read the New York Times offline on their desktops or laptops, though full access to the application is only available to those who subscribe to the printed version of the Times, or to users who subscribe to Times Reader itself for $14.95 per month. The new version of the Times Reader is powered by Adobe AIR, so that Mac and Linux users can now also finally use this application, which, until today, was a Windows-only product.