A small introduction to MicroID
30. April 2007 – 16:47 byRecently I was reminded about MicroID again because people search engine Wink has added support for it.
But So what is MicroID about anyway? MicroID is a fairly new protocol which was developed by Jeremie Miller in 2005. Some of you may know him as the creator of the instant messaging protocol Jabber.
Basically MicroID allows users to claim ownership of content on a website. So for example all songs you listen to in your media player are sent to Last.fm and displayed on your profile page (provided you have an account there, of course). It’s content that you have created and which belongs to you.
How does it work?
The technology is not much of a mystery. It is nothing else than the hash of two other hashed values: the first one is a communication URI like your email address - it can be an OpenID as well, I think -, the second one is the URI of the website your content is published on. All you have to do is paste the hashed code into the header section of that website. It should look similar to this one:
<head>
<meta name="microid" content="mailto+http:sha1:a23b34b863cd411abf4d68bad42a8ab4" />
</head>
As you can see it’s just another meta tag. So if you provide the same email address to MicroID Consumers - also called verifiers - like ClaimID and Wink they can verify that hash value and therefore your claimed content. It is important that you provide the exact email address and URL of the website to the verifier because it independently computes the hash value and compares it to the one in the HTML code of the website.
MicroID Consumers and Producers
Currently there are not many sites supporting MicroID. Consumers are: ClaimID and Wink.
Fortunately there are more MicroID Producers, sites which automatically include a MicroID in their users’ profile pages. Some of them are:
There are also plugins for WordPress (also this one) and Movable Type available.
As we produce more and more content on the web each day, MicroID is a very simple but effective way to claim ownership of that content. Of course, the system can also be faked but since there is a communication URI involved which has to be verified by the Producer as well as by the Consumer (your own website being the exception here) chances are small. There just need to be more sites supporting it to make it successful.
1 Trackback(s)
Sorry, comments for this entry are closed at this time.