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Claiming your online identity

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Wed, 2007-07-11 12:24 — Jeni

I (“Jeni Tennison”) manage to score 10/10 on the online identity calculator, thanks to having a pretty rare name and there being multiple archives of XSL-List, to which I was a prolific contributor in my early XML days. (I think I can also claim to be “Jenni Tennison”, “Jenny Tennison” less so, “Jenifer Tennison” is obviously the pre-XML me, and “Jennifer Tennison” not me at all, and quite rightly so.)

Anyway, I’ve just registered with claimID to get myself an OpenID, to lower the barrier to accessing certain sites. As well as getting a claimID URL (eg http://claimid.com/jenitennison) to use as an OpenID, you can also use the URL of your own web page as your OpenID identity URL which delegates to the claimID identity URL, by adding links to the claimID server in the head of the web page. (View the source of my home page to see what this looks like.) This provides some flexibility in the event that claimID stops functioning: I can move to another OpenID provider without changing my OpenID.

ClaimID uses microID to verify that the pages that you say you own are really pages that you own. A microID is a hash of your email address and the URI of the page, placed in a <meta> element in the head of the HTML page (or in the class attribute of a section of a page). It bothered me for a bit that other people could easily create this hash and put it on their own pages, claiming that I’d created them. Then I realised that microID’s for confirming your claim that you own a page, not for discovering who owns a page (the hashing algorithm is non-reversible), and the only person who can claim a given page (at least on any reputable site) using the email jeni@jenitennison.com is me.

So now I have to work out how to get Drupal to add the hash into the head of my blog pages, and to enable OpenID and microID for people who post comments.

Comments

Wed, 2007-07-11 15:41 — Anthony B. Coates (not verified)

Re: Claiming your online identity

I’m a 9/10, which seems plausible, in the sense that people who want to work out how to contact me, and type my name into Google, don’t seem to have any trouble working out “which” Anthony Coates I am, and from there finding some suitable contact details. Cheers, Tony.

Wed, 2007-07-11 15:07 — John Cowan (not verified)

Skeptical

I’m more than a little skeptical of these people. I got a 10 out of 10 too, despite the fact that only 10 of the top 30 hits for “John Cowan” are about me (most are about the bluegrass singer, who also has johncowan.com).

So I tried again with “John Smith” (over 2 megaghits) and told them only one of the top 30 was about me and that one was irrelevant to my desired image (namely, CEO-level). They still gave me a 5 out of 10, saying “There is a lot of information about you on the Web, but it has little relevance to what you want to express about yourself.” Au contraire, I told them there was very little about “me” on the Web!

Wed, 2007-07-11 18:51 — Jeni

Re: Skeptical

Yes, I certainly hope no one’s taking it too seriously, just seems a vaguely amusing way to augment a bit of ego-surfing.

On the “John Smith” test, I can see why it might not score particularly low. If there are over 2 megahits on John Smith and a page about you is in the top 30 then there must be quite a lot about you on the web (if you average 1/30, then that’s over 6.5 megahits, and the fact that you’ve got a page in the top 30 is fairly impressive given that number of hits). If it was one page from the top 30 and there were only 60 hits overall, that would be worse, at a guess.

Similarly, although you only have 10/30 of the hits on John Cowan, there are 2,220,000 of them, equating to 740,000 pages. The bottom line is that you have a well established online presence, and it’s not hard to locate pages about you, so I’d say that the 10/10 is not unreasonable.

Wed, 2007-07-11 16:52 — Eliot Kimber (not verified)

Re: Skeptical

I too came up 10 out of 10 (I got 96,800 hits on “Eliot Kimber”—I’ve posted a lot of stuff over the years in places that are well archived). Can’t say I’m too impressed though.

Still, the claim ID thing is interesting. I’ve claimed mine.

Cheers,

Eliot