Manage your online identity.Great post from Sam Ruby explaining how to OpenID-enable your blog/website/etc. Says Sam:
Based on the results of my Unobtrusive OpenID post, it is quite evident that there is a lot of partial knowledge about OpenID out there. While my knowledge on the subject is far from complete, this post is my attempt to share what I have learned with others.
Of course, you can use your ClaimID as your OpenID in any of these examples. Enjoy!
Gareth Hannaford writes some very simple, useful advice for keeping his ClaimID page at the top of his search engine results.
I’ve been watching how my ClaimID page stays in the Goggle top ten - it needs updating now and again or it drops off. The first ten are all about me. A result of webweb (better than web2.0?) use and posting in forums.
Gareth is right - search engines look for recent activity to judge a page as fresh and relevant. Think about blogs or wikipedia - they are constantly updated so search engines love them. If you update your ClaimID page every once in a while, search engines will know it is fresh, relevant and likely rank it higher. Of course, this tip pertains to any page you wish to have ranked higher, so thanks to Gareth for sharing!
A question that arrives in our inbox from time to time is “How do I get page X to be the top result for my name?” This is a valid, useful question, so I thought I might share part of the answer for reference. To do so, however, we must first talk about how search engines work.
Since the advent of Google’s PageRank, search engines have relied upon links to determine relevance when ranking results. Jon Kleinberg, a brilliant mathematician at Cornell described the web as being comprised of hubs and authorities. A hub is a site with many outlinks (such as a blog) whereas an authority is a site with many links pointing to it (such as CNN.com or NYTimes.com).
Now, search engine algorithms are extremely complex and we can get into the nuance a little later, but the basic premise to be successful in the task of increasing your name’s rank is that you need to become an authority. Luckily for you, all this means is that you need a lot of links pointing to the desired pages you wish to promote. The key is having your name in the hyperlink pointing to that page.
We can think of relevance in ranking search engine results as a multipart equation (as it is). When someone searches for you, the search engine first looks in its in index to see what pages match. Once it has that big corpus of matching pages, it must then rank them. The search engine uses a combination of the text and qualities of the indexed page, and it looks at how many links are pointing to it that either contain the search terms, or have the search terms in proximity to the hyperlink pointing to the name. It then looks at the quality of the hyperlinks (in Google, the PageRank) and orders your results.
Let’s imagine you want to move a page about you from the second page of search engine results to the top of the first page. As long as you don’t share a name with someone uber-famous or a well-known blogger, the best way to do this is to set up a number of links to that page with your name in the hyperlink text. How do you do this? Well, you can set up blogs, wikis, homepages, a claimID or one of the many other profile listing services - or you can use the secret method of leaving comments on highly ranked blogs. This is my favorite trick - search engines love blogs because they are noisy, frequently updated hubs. And blogs such as members of the Web 2.0 working group have very high ranking - so commenting with your name and your desired URL can prove quite effective. Of course you mustn’t be a troll or be spammy…but if you’re a regular commenter, a simple tweak of your strategy could prove immensely valuable in terms of raising the pages you want to the top of search engines.
Of course, it isn’t all about links. Having a page with your name in the URL, or having a lot of well-structured text on the page with your name inside bolds, h1’s etc will help. However, in terms of bang for your buck, links are the key. It is surprising how few links it takes to have a strong effect. Of course, the quality of the links (the pagerank of the originating domain) will mediate the effect, but any link is extremely valuable.
For more and more of us, being “findable” is becoming a 21st century necessity. By understanding the technologies that enable our findability, you will have more power in protecting your identity and putting your best identity forward.
At ClaimID, we’re pretty enamored with OpenID. OpenID is going to make all of our lives easier, it makes our company more useful and valuable, and more and more smart companies are adopting the standard. That’s pretty exciting to us. I thought it might be useful to collect together some OpenID resources - so we can give our users a little roadmap to OpenID. Feel free to bookmark this to return at a later date (like, when OpenID takes over the world), and of course feel free to add your favorite OpenID resources to the comments below.
1 - What is OpenID?
2 - How does OpenID Work?
3 - OpenID Resource Sites
4 - I want OpenID! Where can I get (and use) an OpenID?
5 - I am advanced. I want some OpenID Software.
6 - OpenID Bloggers.
I hope you all find this useful - please help us build on this resource by adding your ideas to the comment thread. We see OpenID as a very powerful and useful tool, and we hope you’ll join us by trying it out!
Some good news from the OpenID world - blog search engine Technorati has adopted OpenID. This means that if your blogging platform supports OpenID, you can use your login to claim your blog in Technorati. Sure, this is a small step - but it is a small step that has consequence because of its scale.
The idea of using a decentralized identity system to make claims between services is very useful - and it is something we’ve been working on since very early in ClaimID’s development. As more of our identity goes online, it makes sense that we are going to want to claim some of this identity. To address this, we have OpenID and MicroID.
We’re very excited by this news. We’re also really excited by the news that both del.icio.us and Last.fm are now supporting MicroID. These forward-thinking services understand the value of claiming identity - and we’re very happy they have adopted open formats for making these claims. So today, it is a kudos to Technorati, Last.fm and del.icio.us - thank you for joining us in this important work on identity.
Very interesting article on privacy implications in Knowledge@Wharton. In the article, privacy implications of sharing in social tools are examined. Interesting is the following:
Wharton management professor Stephen J. Kobrin says he is not sure that “Who owns you?” is the right question. “It seems there’s just so much information out there about all of us that it’s all in the public domain. It may not be there legally, but there’s so much in so many places and there are so many ways to aggregate it, that it may not be a reasonable question. The real question is: ‘Is it possible to provide some protection to individuals to prevent everything about them from going to everyone else? And, if it is possible, how can you do it?’”
As our identities are document represented in multiple places and contexts - traditional sources like credit reporting agencies, new sources like blogs and SNS - will we see the advent of legislation controlling how we can use this information? It is an intriguing question.
Consider the following scenario - one in which someone spreads gossip about you to a group of friends, and gossip about you online. In the first case, the gossip will likely impact your life, but it may not have long-lasting implications. In the second case, however, when the gossip is cached and stored in search engines, it has a long-lasting impact that may stay with you forever. It is quite different - and very troublesome.
Susan Freiwald, a former Wharton faculty member who now teaches cyberlaw at the University of San Francisco School of Law, says the legal community has been debating for years whether it is more appropriate to view personal information as a form of property that is “owned” and therefore subject to property protections, or to look at personal information as a privacy right. Over time, the privacy-rights model, not the property model, has emerged as the prism through which courts view rights to personal information.
“The ownership model hasn’t taken off in the law,” says Freiwald. “The basic idea in law is that someone who gathers the information owns it, whether it’s you [who gathers it] or not.” For instance, courts have generally rejected arguments by litigants who have challenged the ability of credit card companies to use personal information on the grounds that the litigants “owned” information about themselves.
In Freiwald’s view, however, privacy law remains largely uncharted waters in affording protection to individuals. “Our legal system does a much better job protecting property interests rather than dignity interests, such as privacy,” she says. “You can draw that conclusion by looking at the penalties we impose on people for stealing intellectual or tangible property versus for violating privacy. The law is not protecting personal privacy very well.” When courts do find privacy violations, she says, the penalties are low.
A very interesting article. You can check it out here.
This September 30-October 1, there’s going to be a BarCamp in NYC. As luck has it, I’ll be up in NYC at that time, presenting a paper. I won’t be able to attend the entire BarCamp, but I will be around for part of the first day and most of the second. If you’re in the NYC area, definitely consider signing up to attend BarCampNYC. This summer’s BarCampRDU was a great success, and I’ve been itching to attend another. Please join me - but drop a line or a comment, so I can make sure we meet up.
ClaimID has been developed with a very narrow focus - but a very wide vision.
We have built this tool to focus on the individual, to allow a single person to better allow others to find them and learn about them. We’ve given an individual the ability to do the heavy lifting of those who are searching for them. An individual can provide, in effect, their own search result set for their name.
In doing that, we also developed a list of best practices for monitoring your reputation and what others are saying about you.
This idea as been taken up by a collection of posts in the last couple days concerned with the same thing, but about a brand, or company reputation. What is the network saying about you? What is the network saying about your latest product?
This is no doubt an old concept. This is also no doubt an exciting time where we can have a very tight feedback cycle and directly influence the conversations happening around us. We can jump in and talk back.
Jeremiah Owyang has posted an amended list of Cameron Olthuis’s 10 things you should be monitoring. Then Joseph Jaffe amended that list and upped the ante to 23 things.
Olthuis’s original list is here:
Monitor these, and you won’t be caught unaware.
Additionally, Peter Kim, in the comments of Jaffe’s post, has drawn my attention to an upcoming Forrester Wave report on vendors who provide this very type of brand awareness and brand monitoring.
Sometimes when we release updates we secretly hope they are going to change the world. Hmm, well this one probably isn’t going to change the world, but it is going to be very useful to you. Starting this morning, claimID has added in link status checking.
For many of us, our claimID’s are made up of stuff that we link to but don’t control. As the internet is well, the internet, sometimes this stuff goes offline. As this stuff represents your identity, you want to know when it isn’t there - but you’re too busy to check it every day. Here’s the solution - we’ll do it for you.
Basically, if you enable link status checking, we’ll send a little monkey out once a day to make sure all of the links in your claimID are online. If our little monkey doesn’t find a link on your claimID for a few days, we’ll send you an email letting you know that one of your links has gone offline. This way you will always know what is going on with the stuff that represents your identity online. Indeed, this is very useful.
Couple of caveats with this, however. We’re claiming a big, fat alpha on this service. Accurately checking all of the types of stuff people claim in ClaimID is not a trivial task. As we ramp this up, we know there are going to be false-positive cases we’re going to have to account for. We won’t be able to accurately check everything - however, we will be able to accurately check a good proportion of links in ClaimID.
If you’d like to take advantage of Link Status Checking, all you need to do is log in to your account, and select the little radio button that says “Alert me if my claimed links go offline”. Please work with us and send us bug reports on false positives (or false negatives) to bugs@claimid.com.
We hope that you find this service useful. It is our goal to make it easy for you to manage your identity - and we hope that the link status checker saves you lots of time as you attempt to keep track of what is about you online. We’ll be robustifying this in the future, and possibly even adding in some pay options for advanced checking. Anyway, give it a shot, and let us know what you think!
Yesterday, Noah Kagan linked to a great startup advice list entitled 17 Pithy Insights for Startup Founders. It’s reminiscent of another great list by Blogger founder Evan Willians entitled Ten Rules for Web Startups. We found Williams’ list very early on in the ClaimID process and really took it to heart.
Lists like these commonly feature a core piece of advice with which I agree wholeheartedly. In the pithy list, it is “At the end of each day, ask yourself: “Did the product get better for customers today?”. If you don’t have a good answer, stay up until you do.” Put simply, a startup should make its product better each day. Of course, that doesn’t mean your work is always customer-facing - some days your work might only be blogging or responding to emails. However, the lifeblood of a startup is feeding it with new thought, bugfixes, features - stuff that should be done daily. You must constantly work to make your product better.
Today, we’ve made our product better. Michael Biven and a number of others in the ClaimID community wanted to make groups collapsible so browsing large ClaimID’s was easier. So this morning, we rolled it live, and now you can collapse groups in ClaimID. Indeed, that’s a small improvement. However, the thing about small improvements is that they add up to big improvements. And when the requests come from the community, you know you’re making things better for the people who matter the most.
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