Eric DeLabarWeb 2.0 from a Web Purist and J2EE Developer

At one point in high school I went to a workshop on making a great yearbook. It was interesting, got me out of a day of school, and really helped with the two pages of the book I actually got to work on. Besides that, I took out of it a few facts about portrait composition, mainly that looking right is generally associated with looking into the future and looking left into the past. Recently there’s even been some talk about Obama and his “looking into the future” pose, which definitely follows these guidelines.

But seriously, The Onion aside, every self-respection “Web 2.0” site out there has some sort of avatar available to its users. What does your avatar say about you? Well, I’m no psychologist, in fact I didn’t even take the course on it in college, but here’s what I think anyway.

• Facing Right - Already covered, looking into the future. Possibly optimistic, probably at least positive in nature.
• Facing Left - Again, already covered, looking into the past, possibly back through history. Nostalgic. May or may not be negative, sometimes may seem a little jaded.
• Looking Straight Ahead - Sometimes dominant, sometimes playful, sometimes creepy. As with the next two seems to have more to do with the rest of the facial expression.
• Looking Up - If straight ahead, can be submissive or unconfident, if facing right, increases positive feel, if left, seems narcissistic.
• Looking Down - If straight head, definite dominance, if left or right, shows increasing negativity on past or future view.
• Serious - Boring, possibly pompous; only has an avatar to get 100% on LinkedIn profile or because boss or some self-help personal-branding article said so.
• Goofy - Fun, party-animal, not ready to settle down now, or potentially ever. Probably not the best worker-drone code-monkey but could make a great rock star.
• Picture of Somebody Else - Personally, I find this quite creepy. Usually very hard to actually identify these, in my experience when meeting somebody in the real world and finding their avatar doesn’t match I get a little turned off. This can be pulled off ironically by using an obvious-not-you type of photo as more of a caricature, but I have only seen this pulled off well a few times.
• Picture of Somebody Famous - The more famous the better, if the picture is not recognized by he majority of your audience it simply becomes “Picture of Somebody Else” and therefore loses its power. May also appear very stalker-like or just plain juvenile if done in a fan-boy manner.
• Professional Portrait - See “serious” above, screams real estate agent, lawyer, sales person, or scammy-internet marketer.
• Candid - Probably my favorite type. Seems sincere and real.
• Group Photo - Lack of self-confidence or own identity, possibly critical of own appearance.
• Caricature - Makes me wonder about self-confidence, but could be done in irony. Potential for inside jokes here. A good caricature plays on flaws, so this may say positive things about self confidence.
• Animal(s) - Awe!!!1 OMG look at the cute kittens and ponies! I can haz cheesburger? Seriously. Unless you’re twelve or doing it for purely and obviously ironic reasons I usually look down on this as somebody I’m not even interested in listening to.
• Logo or Mascot - Definitely used for self-branding or maybe just branding in general, if done well can be a great asset, but may also appear very spammy if done poorly. May say things about self-image or confidence, especially if hiding behind anonymity.
• Object - Like an animal, logo, or picture of somebody else, this gives the user complete anonymity and can become very hard to read-into. Lots of room for irony or playfulness can allow personality to shine through, but if not done well it may just turn into a poor inside joke.

Now, please understand, I’m not necessarily criticizing ANY use of an avatar in one of these manners; in fact there is probably somebody out there that has a very good reason for using a pony for their avatar, and I’m sure they do it well. I’m just saying this is what my first impression of you is based on the two seconds I’ve had to see your avatar.

Well, what do you think? Am I right? Am I completely wrong? Did I just insult you and your mother with my analysis of your avatar? Just to remind you, I have no scientific backing for doing this, which I’m guessing makes it a better analysis, but if you disagree, tell me why I’m wrong.

If you’re here because of Josh Porter’s posts on social network and social niche sites on his blog Bokardo, you might find these posts interesting:

• Following The Conversation Elsewhere
• More On Identity
• Online Identity and the Social Graph
• Identity and OpenId

If you like what you’re reading, please subscribe! I post every weekday on “Web 2.0” topics like JavaScript, CSS, web semantics, and of course the social web.

(Please excuse the looks, I’m not quite done with the theme for this site yet, but it looks much better than a week ago!)

A few days ago I commented on this post over at Publishing 2.0, ignoring the semantic debate of whether the article described intermediation or disintermediation, I came up with an idea that I personally find very interesting. I touched on this idea on Tuesday’s post when I said:

How about blog and forum comments, it would be great to have an authenticated and decentralized means of establishing me on a site that is not my own. It would be even better if I could then aggregate these comments into my own site to track my current conversations in the blogosphere.

In that article I relied on Google to crawl the site and provide the aggregation for me, what if we looked at it more like my Publishing 2.0 comment and provided a reverse trackback ping.

In order for this to really work, we need a few things, one, we need a service that accepts the ping; Wordpress accepts trackback pings, so let’s assume this is easy to implement. Since most blog comment systems accept a blog URL, we know the author’s URL, append to that a well known URI to accept the ping and we now have an endpoint. So far, so good. Next, we need identity, in order for this to work people cannot be able to spam the system, we need a pretty solid concept of identity. To borrow from MicroID, URL + email = identity, since most (if not all) blog comments accept email and don’t show it, we can create a MicroID hash and add it to the comment’s container element as a class according to the Microformat class pattern. Finally, once the comment is approved and posted, the blog pings the commenter’s blog with the generated MicroID and the post URL, the commenter’s blog visits the site and extracts the comment via the MicroID class, and adds it to the feed of current conversations.

I like the concept, only one problem, it requires both the client and server to understand this reverse trackback ping. If we lived in a Wordpress-only world this would be pretty simple, one plug-in, or better yet a change to the code base, and the functionality is there. I’ve also considered a JavaScript bug placed in the post by the author who’s blog contains an endpoint, but javascript and comments probably don’t mix well, and we really only need a ping the first time not every time the page is loaded. Another option would be the manual approach, telling your own blog to go crawl the blog you’ve just posted on for your comments; or possibly even a third-party service that just crawls blogs looking for MicroID classes and then publishes the results as a feed that a commentor’s blog can consume. Manual is pretty much overkill, it would probably be easier to just create a new post and copy and paste the comments. The third party service just means one more service silo and eliminates the control of your own identity because now the content is stored there, as well as the problem of having to rely on a third party to spider the blog before your content gets updated. So there’s the impasse, a logical idea without a practical application.

For now, my first Wordpress plug-in is going to be an experiment to see if this works, and then we’ll move on from there, unless of course Chi.mp is moving in that direction, then I guess we’ll just have to see what they come up with.

First things first, three new entries to the Blogroll: Bokardo, Like It Matters, and Own Your Identity. I’ve been a long-time Bokardo reader, and the other two entries came from that. Josh Porter from Bokardo is a contributer to Own Your Identity, which is also contributed to by Brian Oberkirch of Like It Matters and Myles Weissleder. Own Your Identity is the blog for the Ch.imp (Content Hub and Identity Management Platform) project, which is described in this post. I love the concept, a decentralized identity hub that you install on your own domain.

I also came across ClaimID, a blog on managing your online identity, which lead me to MicroID, which seems like a microformat-based cross between FOAF’s foaf:mbox_sha1sum and an inverted XFN rel="me", in other words you place a meta element on pages that you own with a hash generated from your online identity (consisting of email and url), which looks something like this:

<meta name="microid" content="mailto+http:sha1:53410a9d6d408f3a92288a6543f16f4a9703ceea"/>

I’m not 100% sold yet and I think I’m missing some of the details, but I’m interested, and I’ve added it to my head element.

If I’m ever going to be rich and famous people will need to know who I am. *Removes tongue from cheek.* If anyone knows who I am it should probably be Google. How good is a web guru if they’re not number one in Google for their own name? Seriously would you trust anything I had to say if you couldn’t find me in Google? Well, it seems I have that covered, at least for now, I’m number one, two, three and four on a search for eric delabar. My problem starts with result number five.

The previous owner of the number one spot on Google is a professional soccer player and coach who shares my name. No offense to him, but I really don’t want the association. So here’s my problem, I can establish me, but how do I establish not me?

To establish me I’ve of course created this blog, it’s hosted on ericdelabar.com how more authoritative can you be. I’ve created an identity page written with XFN markup to establish what other sites, accounts, and profiles out there are mine, and I’ve created a FOAF file and linked to it from the head of this document. If I understand the Google Social Graph API, this pretty much means I’ve established me, at least I will have as soon as my site’s been crawled and indexed.

What about not me? Good question; there is no rel="not-me" in XFN, maybe there should be, but then again is it really necessary? It’s also really not the point of XFN, maybe Google needs some extensions in order to more appropriately identify the edge types. Or maybe they just figure that if I used my identity page to point to all sites that are me doesn’t that mean anything that isn’t specified isn’t me? What about things I haven’t written myself? For instance a news article on “Eric DeLabar,” can I establish that one article is about me and another article is about the soccer player? How about blog and forum comments, it would be great to have an authenticated and decentralized means of establishing me on a site that is not my own. It would be even better if I could then aggregate these comments into my own site to track my current conversations in the blogosphere.

I guess what this all comes down to is that I’m wondering how long until Google has the ability to generate something like the following:

Google, are you listening? A few more microformat parsers, an opt-out (or opt-in) page, and the information you already have.