On Mar 27, 2006, at 3:40 PM, jer wrote:
Boy, once Doc gets a hold of something... I was going to send out a
little note here asking for some feedback, but it's gone full circle
already :)
Anyway, MicroID isn't exactly a microformat all by itself but it can
be expressed in conjunction with one. It's really just an opaque but
verifiable owner token, allowing anyone to point at something and say
"that's mine" which can be verified by using their email address (or
any supported communication identifier).
I'm not sure how useful an email address is as a shared secret. If you
use a publicly-known one, anyone who knows it can spoof your signature;
if you use a unique address per service then you need multiple
microid's.
The itch I'm scratching is two part, I'm tired of having to put some
button or javascript code (or upload a funky named empty file) on my
blog/site to verify that I have editorial control over it. This
practice is becoming more and more common, and the technology to do
this once and for all isn't brain surgery.
Your long hash reminds me of the original Technorati claiming model,
which was a hash of the user ID and blog URL, which I deprecated as the
ID's were too long and cumbersome to send around easily - urls with
them in tended to get wrapped in email, so people ended up making their
blog invalid by adding a url with a newline in the middle, and my
parser had to cope with that.
Hence we went to a 10-character randomly-assigned ID model, as the ID
is not guessable.
As Chris said on his blog, the bidirectionally-verified rel="me" is a
sounder way to do this - see http://gmpg.org/xfn/and/
The second part is to have a MicroID published with a "score"
microformat (well really just class='score' unless someone has a
better idea) that is wrapped around any comment or content published
on a moderated system. If I get modded up and have a good reputation
on that system, why can't there be a solid technical way for me to
verify my reputation (or just a bag of all my scores) to anyone that
cares? If these moderated systems publish a simple MicroID with the
score output, it makes my reputation portable as much as I want it to
be.
As your model is spoofable if I know your email, I'm not sure what this
gains for you over showing the ID or email directly in the moderated
system.
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