Doc points to microformat-compliant MicroID (“Small Decentralized Verifiable Identity”) by Jabber founder Jeremie Miller:
…a new Identity layer to the web and Microformats that allows anyone to simply claim verifiable ownership over their own pages and content hosted anywhere. The technology is radically simple and capable of empowering new and unique meta services with only minor effort.
I read over the description, but I still don’t quite get it.
A simpler solution (for web authors at least) is reciprocity using XFN. Essentially if I have access to two websites, I can link between them using the rel="me"
microformat — very similar to what Technorati does with its claiming snippet.
So one rel="me"
link implies an unconfirmed relationship, two or more confirms, for the purpose of building an exploratory network (non-authoritative), a relationship. Add in an
and you can start building an ad hoc profile that will result with a profile like the one I’m building on ClaimID.
So the way I see it, MicroID allows me to lay ownership to any piece of arbitrary content on the web, provided I can set the class of the object. In cases where that’s not possible, I’m not sure MicroID will work.
With the rel="me"
solution, you can claim URLs that you can create links with rel
values. Neither is perfect but both are decent uses of microformats for faking identity.
Update: change MicroID from a “.com” to a “.org” . Thanks Kevin!