One of the biggest problems with photo sharing apps so far is that they all tend to only allow you to share one photo at a time. While this keeps the quality of photos shared high, it creates some problems.

It’s a painful process if you want to share multiple photos from an event, as part of a theme, or just to get photos off your phone and put them in a place they can be shared without the painful process of downloading them to a computer and then uploading them somewhere.

Tonight Mike Arrington broke the news that the team at self-photo taking startup DailyBooth recently launched a photo sharing app called Batch for the iPhone.

I downloaded Batch and immediately loved it for the following reasons:

• The design is beautiful. I love the handwritten instructions that overlay the screen in certain areas, and it walks you through how to use the application really well.
• Uploading photos in a batch is great. The first time I got to touch multiple photos and have them uploaded at once I saw the value in the speed and simplicity of sharing the photos in a batch.
• Automatic friend connection via Facebook makes it nice to not have to worry about building up my social graph. As friends join Batch, we’ll just get connected. Simple. This has some downsides in that you can’t customize who you follow or don’t follow yet, but I prefer it over having to start from scratch and manually choose everything and hope my friends find me.
• You can see the future potential if batches from one event or location are grouped automatically and viewable together. It could nicely fulfill the promise of Color that never came to be.

If you have an iPhone and share photos, give Batch a try in the app store.

• The addition of video, images, and form input boxes can actually provide a lot of help and value to a user searching for specific information. The ability to watch a Pedigree commercial without leaving the search results page is helpful and interactive. Or how about entering your zip code for an Esurance quote?
• It is innovation in an area that actually hasn’t seen that much innovation for an area that has so much business being done through it. It’ll be fascinating to see testing results from this.
• If done well, I imagine it will provide better results and more interaction for the advertiser.

I can’t wait to see this roll out more and hear about the results.

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The New York Times recently published an article about Arnold Kim who runs MacRumors.com, one of the most successful blogs on the web.

It’s not really a touching rags to riches story as Kim was already earning a six-figure income as a doctor, but it is a great example how identifying a need, then building a relatively simple site, and working really hard to create great content over the years can put you in a great place.

The site placed MacRumors No. 2 on a list of the “25 most valuable blogs,” right behind Gawker Media and ahead of The Huffington Post, PerezHilton.com, and TechCrunch. Two of the other tech-oriented blogs on its list, Ars Technica and PaidContent, were sold earlier this year, reportedly for sums in excess of $25 million.

The cynics out there will say “Sure, but all the good topics already have established sites today so it’s too hard to compete.” While it’s true it’d be hard to crack the rumor market for Apple right now, it’s far from true in general. There are new areas of interest all the time that lend themselves to opportunities. Techcrunch is one of the most successful sites out there, and it was started a couple of years ago when Web 2.0 caught fire.

Just now the market is somewhat open for someone to do a great job covering the iPhone App world in great detail and becoming THE resource. An established site like MacRumors.com has an advantage of already having a foothold in this area, but they also suffer from not being able to focus on the topic exclusively.

It’s not that hard to think up topics if you open your mind, the harder part is putting in the effort for years creating content and marketing your site to achieve the success. It’s exciting to know though that the door is still wide open, and I think we’ll be reading stories like this for years to come.

The arguments for summaries are that it makes people come visit your website where you can make money from ads, get the visitors for your web analytics, protect people from stealing your full content, and hit people with links to more content. The thing is, you can do that within your feeds in different ways. There are a few different RSS advertising providers like Yahoo Publisher Network, Feedburner, Text Link Ads Feedvertising, or Pheedo. There are also plugins to let you sell ads in your feed yourself.

Additionally, there are ways you can put links to your prominent content in your feeds, and you can also use feed analytics from Feedburner or others to track the visitors and usage. As for protecting your content, John Chow and others are putting notices in their feeds with links to their sites if it shows up on other sites.

I think people who use summary-only feeds are going to dramatically lose readership as people move to more feed reading over mobile devices. Just a warning….

While WhateverLife.com is definitely not my cup of tea, it’s an impressive story of a high school student with some basic HTML skill building a web business many would really enjoy owning.

I think there are three basic lessons that can be gathered from the long article and applied to any web ventures:

1. It doesn’t matter who or where you are. You can be a high school student in Detroit with no business or web experience and build a successful business. On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. In some ways, having a ton of work and business experience can be a hindrance because you become trained to see why things WON’T work instead of driving to just achieve your goals.
2. Build your site around something you’re passionate about. Ashley didn’t start her site with the plans to make it a huge business, she started it because she found something she was interested in and just wanted to help. That passion for your topic is extremely important.
3. It helps to be your demographic. Even though I’m much more experienced on the web and in the web business world, Ashley would do a better job of building WhateverLife.com then I would because she is the target audience. Just like Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, there’s a huge advantage to being the audience you are targeting. You understand their needs, their wants, what they’re thinking, and what they do and don’t think is cool. I’d have a hard time relating to the audience of high school girls.

Hopefully Ashley made good decisions passing on her buyout offers and continues to build WhateverLife.com.

I think it will be educational, great for beginners, but also provide some nuggets of wisdom that even experts will benefit from.

If you’re interested in this panel idea, please go vote for it by giving it a star rating. Note: You do need to sign up for a free account to register, they promise to not spam you.

Here’s the deals announced over the past week:

Discovery buys Treehugger for $10 million – A single blog that grew into a community with forums and more, but $10 million seems pretty solid for a blog in a specific industry. Although it is a very important and growing industry.

Disney buys Club Penguin for $350 Million or More? – This one looks really bizarre if you had no background on Club Penguin. However, it’s an insanely popular site with kids. One has to wonder though, how long will penguins be the cool virtual pet for kids? Apparently there are earnouts in this deal to the tune of another $350 million. Without really doing much analysis, it feels like Club Penguin’s founders are sitting back laughing they sold a site about being a penguin for at least $350 million.

Handheld Buys Ebaum’s World for $15 million or More? – Another deal that has more earnouts with performance goals. Ebaum’s has been around forever, so you’d wonder why they’d be selling now? And are they kicking themselves they could have been YouTube but just missed out on a few basic things?

Rumor: Sparkpeople to sell for $75 Million – Doesn’t look like this one is confirmed yet, but I’d never heard of Sparkpeople. Apparently it’s the third-largest dieting site. Good for them.

Then we also have publisher success like Markus Frind of PlentyofFish who has long been a proponent of growing independently and not building out a huge business. He’s either announcing he’s for sale as well now, or is really serious about going from a one-man operation to a full-fledged company with employees and a sales team.

What does this recent activity mean? Are we in a bubble where publishers are taking advantage and selling for a crazy premium? To some it seems that way, but in other ways you wonder what would happen if the publishers continued to hold out and grow their business even more. Some of the publishers who sold out back in the early part of this decade would be worth far more today had the stayed independent. At the same time, I think it’s never black and white and in many cases depends on the particular situation each publisher finds themselves in. Can they grow more on their own? Are there more advantages that a bigger parent company can provide to further their mission?

Unfortunately I don’t have the answers, but I think it’s a great time to be a successful web publisher. You can potentially find a solid offer for your business if you wish to be acquired, or you can keep on growing and building. It’s still a very young industry.