MicroID army, activate!

Terrell Russell — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 20:29:16 +0000

So, having spent some time implementing these little things called MicroIDs and ruminating through my own research on distributed cognitive authority (reputation and expertise), I’m calling out for all of you who get MicroIDs to go forth and ask your favorite web application providers to generate them for the public-facing user pages on their services.

It’s really easy to do – microid.org

MicroID =
sha1_hex( sha1_hex(“mailto:user@email.com”) + sha1_hex(“http://example.com/username”) )

which generates something like this:

< meta name="microid" content="33bef99225cc32fe3c8c14e05c33e26266370778" />

With MicroIDs generated and positioned in the of these services – third parties can verify that the same person (with the same independently verified email address) is the ‘owner’ of that account. This is big. This is powerful.

Please leave a comment with any activity / updates…

del.icio.us – done!

flickr.com – forum thread

ma.gnolia.com – done!

linkedin.com

last.fm – forum thread – done!

wikipedia.org – MediaWiki extension