Manage your online identity.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has just posted a new study on home broadband adoption.  The takeaway of the study is the second half of the study’s subtitle: Home broadband adoption is going mainstream and that means user-generated content is coming from all kinds of internet users.  Pew’s key findings include:

• 48 million internet users have posted content to the internet and the large
  majority of them are home broadband users.
• Overall, 35% of all internet users have posted content to the internet.
• An even higher percentage of home broadband users – 42% or about 31 million people – have posted content to the internet.

As you can imagine, seeing statistics like these makes us feel rather validated in our work.  Almost 50 million of us are leaving our digital footprints online - footprints that will stay with us for the rest of our lives.  We’ll want tools to manage our online identities; here at ClaimID, we’re thinking of new strategies every day.

You can download the whole Pew report here.  It is fascinating.

Ooh, there’s lots in the pipeline here at ClaimID. Here are some things we’re working on, to be rolled out soon.

• Link verification with MicroID. You put the MicroID in your page, ClaimID verifies it for you.
• Link status checks by ClaimID. You wanna know when the pages you’ve claimed have gone away, right? ClaimID will take care of that for you - plus give you some interesting options for keeping your links online. We’ll talk more about that later.

These are two services that are going to go a long way towards making ClaimID even more useful to you. In other news, the ClaimID folks will be heading up to Boston, MA for the Identity Mash-Up conference. With a tag line of “Who controls and protects the digital me,” we just couldn’t pass it up. If you’re going to attend, drop us a line and we can catch up!

Brian Ellin, one of those smart guys over at JanRain, has taken an afternoon coffee break and released a small script to protect any files you want to share online, but only to a group of people you trust. It’s a first pass, but it works. Best of all, Brian doesn’t have to do anything with passwords or accounts - just URLs. Brilliant!

So, still sitting at the coffee shop, I wrote a little program that restricts access to parts of your website via OpenID. You can download an unpolished version of it if you like. It verifies your identity and then if you are in the list of trusted people, lets you have access to my resources. It is a Ruby CGI script that you can probably use on any webserver so long as you have the OpenID libraries installed.

The OpenID libraries are available in a variety of languages.

Daniel Andrlik, the Minister of Intrigue, has posted a wonderful meditation on ClaimID on his blog. He explores features, use cases, and asks important questions.

Admittedly, someone like myself could just create and maintain a page like that on my own site, but not everyone has their own domain, even though they might have a significant presence online via social networking sites like MySpace, LiveJournal, Last.fm, or other sites. For those types of users, a service like claimID can be invaluable as a resource, as our digital and analog lives continue to converge. In fact, I would argue that this type of service has a great deal of value for those of us who do have our own sites, as claimID provides a way to standardize the data. Just include a link on your site, homepage in another networking site, or even on your resume to your claimID user page in order to provide readers with a sort of executive summary of your online identity. Also, by linking to your user page, and by using your legal name for your claimID username you will increase the search rankings of your “link resume” which helps get people to your page faster.

This is going in our favorite reviews category. Now I’ve got a question that maybe you can help me out with. Over 250 bloggers have written stories about ClaimID, and we’re interested in re-paying them (in Technorati karma). How would you suggest the best way to go about this? Do we do a few posts where we just link back to these blog entries? Would that totally annoy ClaimID blog readers? Please let me know your thoughts. It seems only fair to link back to people, especially if we’re corporate blogging. Everyone loves links!

Finally, we’ve been introducing bugfixes left and right lately. The big news is we fixed an IE bug that was crashing browsers. The problem was with a css width:expression call. We’re so not IE css experts, but those of you who are are probably laughing at us. That’s ok. We’re making progress on OpenID’ing ClaimID, which we couldn’t do without the help of the excellent minds at JanRain. The summer is off to a good start!

While ClaimID certainly takes up a lot of our time, Terrell and I do have a number of other projects we work on.  I thought it might be interesting to share this Red Hat Magazine article about Lyceum - a project that I’ve been working on for quite some time now.  Written by Lyceum chief software architect John Joseph Bachir, the article provides a complete overview of the project - the rationale behind its conception, key design decisions, security and spam strategies, and project management.

What’s Lyceum?  Lyceum is a multi-user, multi-blog version of Wordpress.  Imagine that you run a company, and you want to give your employees blogs.  With Lyceum, you would just download and install, and all of your employees would log in and be given their own fantastic Wordpress blogs.  Lyceum lets you have the functionality of Blogger, Typepad or Wordpress.com wherever you want, under your control.  And the best part is Lyceum is incredibly fast, scalable and of course free and open source.

If you’re interested in creating your own blogospheres - whether they be for your clients, your family, your dorm, whatever - I’d encourage you to take a look at Lyceum.  The Red Hat Magazine article, coupled with an upcoming article in Reference Services Review will provide you ample reading material - but I’d recommend just downloading Lyceum and trying it out.  Supported by ibiblio.org, one of the web’s oldest and largest open source resources, Lyceum’s a great project, with a growing community of fantastic developers.  I’d definitely encourage you to check it out if you’re interested in Wordpress, multi-user/multi-blog services, or just blogging in general.

Things have been very exciting at ClaimID recently. Our recent podcast on Inside the Net has attracted a lot of new users (who have submitted extremely helpful feature requests and bug reports) and has sparked a lot of discussion. To watch a Technorati watchlist and see people discussing, sharing, criticizing and recommending a product you developed is absolutely exhilarating. Sure, we’re just a tiny speck in the big marketplace of ideas, but we get a kick out of it. Thanks to everyone helping develop ClaimID with their public commentary (that’s right, I said develop).

When we started ClaimID, we intended to create a model. Sure, before ClaimID you could “claim” your links on your homepage or blog - and certainly many people have done that in the past. Just as blog services opened up a new world of conversation to people who weren’t technically inclined, we wanted to give everyone the opportunity to simply and easily claim their online identity. I can’t tell you how many blog posts I’ve read where people say “Why didn’t I think of that.” The answer is you did - we’ve all been thinking about our online identity and how to approach it; ClaimID has just given you a five-minute-a-month model for dealing with it.

A number of people have suggested that since ClaimID doesn’t control your identity, it doesn’t work. They feel that the only way a service like this could work is if it is tied to your bank accounts or social security. These are valid concerns - but they completely miss the point of ClaimID. Your links are another artifact of your online identity - just like your pictures, your bookmarks, your social network profiles. All of these things make up our identity, and none of them are tied to your social security. David Weinberger, in Small Pieces Loosely Joined, described the internet as such:

Being on the Web doesn’t make an individual more authentic. We know that people use the Web to fool themselves and others. Any page or chat room persona may be as dishonest as a senior manager’s expense report. If the Web is bringing us closer to human authenticity, it is doing so at the level of our species, not individuals.

Here at ClaimID, we realize we can’t change human nature. And to build a company on the assumption that we could change human nature would be a fool’s errand. ClaimID isn’t perfect, but nothing is. We acknowledge that - but we work every day to make ClaimID be more perfect, make more sense, and be more useful for you.

In creating a ClaimID account, you’ve done something very powerful. En masse, thousands of you are changing the way we think about identity on the net. Our identity is no longer just what a search engine says about us - but what we say about what a search engine says about us. It’s a fine distinction, but it’s the difference between someone misquoting your biography and you correcting it. We’re going to be on the web for the rest of our lives - and maybe we’re not all ready to start dealing with this issue, but when we are ClaimID will be there.

Today, we spoke with Leo Laporte (leo) and Amber MacArthur (ambermac) for Inside the Net 21: ClaimID on This Week in Tech.

The interview lasts just over 38 minutes.

A great interview team, they asked all about claimID and had us walk them through our inspiration and development process. We talked about the features we have and all the features we chose to leave out to keep it simple. They seemed genuinely happy to be able to claim their online activities - it was quite fun to hear them ‘get it’ on the air.

We spoke about Ruby on Rails and our feelings on the framework that allowed us to serve a live product in only five months. We spoke about microformats as well as our time at the Internet Identity Workshop last week.

We had a great time and let me say, using Skype for interviews is wonderful. No long distance and from the comfort of your own couch. Tough to beat.

This will surely vault us into the position of “most sought after graduate students to talk to about big-time web application development”. Or something like that.

Thanks Leo and Amber.

Came across this picture posted to a comment thread on Holly Ward’s blog.  Photo by Tantek of Technorati.  We’re the two goofs in the back left.

How do search engines decide a page is about you? Well, that’s a fairly complicated process, and lots of people spend a lot of time worrying about it. At ClaimID, we worry about it for you - but there are some things you can do to make search engines rank your name higher. Here’s two simple suggestions:

1. As Patrick Cormier points out, search engines highly rank results where the URL text matches the query text. English, please? Ok, lets say you’re searching for someone named “Steve Smith.” Now, lets say there’s a website out there named http://domain.com/steve-smith.html. The URL matches the search query, and the search engine will rank this page very highly! If you choose your name as your claimID username, (for example, http://claimid.com/steve-smith) the search engines will rank your claimID page even higher. Sort of cool, huh? If you’ve got an existing claimID user name and would like to change it to match your name, simply email us and ask - we’ll be happy to make the change for you!
2. If you’ve got a page (like a blog or website) that is about you, linking to your claimID page will make your claimID rank higher! This will also let people know that your claimID is absolutely about you. If you look in your account settings, we’ve included a number of ways for you to link your blog or webpage to your claimID (we’ve got a chicklet, a wordpress widget, a hCard, and a data feed!). If you can think of other easy ways to link to ClaimID from your blog or webpage - let us know! We’re all ears.

Thank you for using ClaimID. ClaimID is a unique service in that we’re building it to your needs. ClaimID will always be simple, and we’ve done this for a reason. Online identity is hard, and we want claimID to be a place you can come where you’ll find the solutions you need. It’s as simple as that. No gimmicks, just the stuff you need.

Vloggers Command N cover ClaimID on their most recent episode.  We appear eight minutes in, if you want to find us directly.  It’s nice coverage - we’re used to reading about claimID when Technorati sends us links, but to see it discussed - very, very cool!

In other news, right now we’re at the IIW, enjoying great conversation and healthy conference food.  I can’t tell you how great it is to wander out of a session to a table of fresh fruit.  Compliments to the organizers.