Manage your online identity.

In another article sent to us a few times, The New York Times reported Saturday on the increasing student awareness that companies looking to hire are also looking online for additional clues about their applicants. It is a growing reality for these students, and for the rest of us, that what happens online is part of who we are and what we’re projecting to others. And that it matters more than ever.

“I think students have the view that Facebook is their space and that the adult world doesn’t know about it,” said Mark W. Smith, assistant vice chancellor and director of the career center at Washington University in St. Louis. “But the adult world is starting to come in.”

The adult world, as well as the rest of the world, is catching on to what we’ve seen around us on campus. Students are sharing more information and aggregating it in ways that are unprecedented. Job applicants should take control of what they project online, and be aware of how the images and stories they’re posting reflect on them as people, reflect on their character and their decision making capabilities.

“I was just shocked by the amount of stuff that she was willing to publicly display,” Ms. Homayoun said. “When I saw that, I thought, ‘O.K., so much for that.’ “

It will matter to all of us, it’s just that the students of today are the first ones to test the waters of our new everpresent, highly interconnected digital identity. It’s not supposed to be scary, it’s just the way it’s going to be - and you should be prepared by thinking through the possible ramifications ahead of time.

ClaimID can help you take some control.

Manage the discussion of what is already out there - in addition to being smart about what you post and share in the first place.

A few weeks ago, ClaimID spoke with Aldo Castañeda, the man behind the must-listen identity podcast The Story of Digital Identity. Today, Aldo posted the interview, and we’re quite pleased with the result. In the interview, we explore ClaimID - the service, the problem we’re trying to solve, the challenges, the design decisions - attempting to give folks more of an idea of where we’re coming from. Podcasts like Aldo’s are vital for helping us spark the conversation we need to be having about our search identity.

Listen to this podcast - and if you’re even tangentially interested in Identity 2.0, subscribe. The previous episodes with Dave Evans (link) and Johannes Ernst and Dick Hardt (link) were very informative and enjoyable. Thanks to Aldo - you’re really doing the identity community a great service with your work.

Josh Peek has produced a nice little snippet showing how to use the ClaimID API with Ruby. This should come in handy to folks working to integrate a custom ClaimID feed into your blog, mobile app or whatever. A sincere thanks to Josh for creating this - we’ve also linked to this snippet from our internal API page as well, should you need it.

In other news, we came across a fantastic post covering ClaimID from the new PostBubble blog (a joint venture of ACS and Webreakstuff). I really took this post to heart, so I wrote a personal reply over on my blog. If you’re interested in what people say or think about us, I’d recommend a read - this post really captures the essence of the problem we’re trying to solve. Here’s a snippet:

It is visionary, it has the flexibility to go everywhere, and it solves global problems that are only going to become more global as time goes by. There is more to claimID than just managing your online identity. ClaimID is going to become a currency for individuals. It will be your online credit card, drivers license, or even alter-ego. It’s like oxygen. It is pervasive, will be everywhere, and has the chance to do so many different things that trying to isolate a simple business model and predict where it will go is like predicting the weather. We all know how good our weather prediction is, I don’t need to spell that out. So this is what bothered me about claimID. Those guys are onto something that will be so normal I can barely articulate why its so good. All I can say is good job, you’ll swim because you are Normal.

Finally, if you’ve developed anything with the ClaimID API that you’d like to share, drop us a line and let us know. We’d love to link to it here, and on our internal pages.

A great number of people have asked us for verification, and we’ve listened. I’m proud to announce that ClaimID now offers verification of your ClaimID links. Here’s a peek at my ClaimID page, with verification (purple highlight mine):

If you look next to the link, you’ll see “Verified.” This means that ClaimID has verified that I’m the owner of the pages I’ve claimed (We’ll probably come up with a verified logo at some point…or is text elegant enough?).

The verification process is very simple. We provide you with a MicroID that you embed in your claimed page. We then go out and check to see if the MicroID is there, and the rest is history. MicroID, developed earlier this year by Jeremie Miller, is a simple identity microformat. We think MicroID is perfect for this purpose - if you want to learn more, visit the MicroID website or blog.

To get started verifying your links, just log in to your ClaimID account and hover over your links - you’ll see a link called Verify. Once you click Verify, you’ll get a code snippet to embed in your page. After you embed the snippet, you just click a link and we go and check the MicroID. Like everything with ClaimID, we’ve kept this absolutely simple. (This process is also thoroughly documented in our help section)

A word about claiming things. Obviously, most of us won’t be able to claim everything on our ClaimID. We can’t edit pages that we don’t own - at least legally :). So don’t sweat that you can’t verify everything. Verify the stuff you can, or want to. Link verification is a big first step toward making ClaimID a verified place. We’ve got big things in the works with identity verification, too. People have asked, and we’ve listened. Let us know what you think!

Bryan Veloso, formerly of Facebook, has written a wonderful piece about LinkedIn and claimID. I’ll quote the big finale here, but definitely go and read the whole thing. He gets it.

When you get to a certain point, you can’t control what people start writing about you, but what you can do is filter that content to the necessary parties. Remember, it’s about being pro-active and taking control of what’s out there. These services won’t do the work for you and you’ll only get as much out of it as you put into it.

His About page is one of the best I’ve seen anywhere - a collection of textual overview and then links to specifics. His links include LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, and claimID.

That’s proud company we keep, indeed.

Bryan’s definitely going in the sidebar over there under favorites. Thanks Bryan!

I know that a lot of folks who use ClaimID like the fact we’ve worked to integrate microformats.  In the identity space, microformats make a ton of sense - we give you data bits that you are free to share wherever you’d like, in a standardized format.  It represents an opening of identity - which has typically always been a walled garden play (note - we know we’ve still got a long way to go).

It was very exciting to find out this morning that Technorati has introduced microformats search and Pingerati.  Developed by Tantek Çelik, Pingerati and microformats search come together to create a searchable database of contacts, events, reviews, lists - anything that can be Microformats enabled - here’s an example.  As with all things microformats, search and Pingerati are extremely simple to use - to start pushing your microformats-enabled content into the database, you only need to click a bookmarklet!  If you’re a content provider, pinging is incredibly easy - we’re going to work to get ClaimID automatically pinging Pingerati.

This project was clearly a labor of love for Tantek - the evangelist and developer of many microformats standards.  Very nice work - this will prove to be a very useful service.