MicroID Development

M. David Peterson loves the simplicity of MicroIDs. And Terrell Russell is encouraging various providers to use MicroIDs to show page ownership on the ‘net.

Keep those cards and letters coming!

I’ve created a mailing list for the MicroID community.  The address is , and you can subscribe to the list at http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/microid.  This list will be open, and the archives will be public.  If you’re interested in MicroID, want to keep up with the spec, or want to connect with other folks implementing MicroID, this list will be useful to you.

In other news, I’ll be hanging out in the #microid channel on irc.freenode.net.  If you’re interested in chatting about MicroID or have quick questions, you may be able to find people in the channel.

As an update to a previous post, here is some recent work in the MicroID world.

• Phil Windley’s Movable Type MicroID plugin has been updated by Tim Appnel
• Josh Peek has released a MicroID plugin for rails and for the RadiantCMS.
• has released a to test a Mediawiki extension for generating MicroID’s.

Anything that I’m missing? Yes - we do plan on centralizing these on a webpage, we’ve got to figure out where. If we can get accepted as a Microformat, we’ll likely keep track of these on the wiki. To that extent, in the next few weeks we’ll probably get started writing our RFC for the Microformats process. If you’re interested in proofing/contributing feedback, watch this space.

Of course, if you’re doing anything cool with MicroID, let us know! We’d love to blog it and add it to our growing lists of cool stuff.

The good folks at contacted us to let us know that they are MicroIDs.

Keep those cards and letters coming!

Thank you to Jeremie for the nice intro. I’m Fred, and I will be working alongside Jeremie and Peter as we get stuff rolling over here. Now, as much as I’m a fan of talking at length ;), I figured I’d start off blogging here by sharing with you some great MicroID resources that have been popping up all over the net.

First off are two MicroID generation plugins for the WordPress blogging platform:

• Myles A. Braithwaite’s MicroID WordPress Plugin
• Richard K. Miller’s MicroID Plugin for WordPress

Myles mentions that his plugin and Richard’s are a little different, so you’ll want to see which ones answer your needs best. Next, we’re on to a MicroID plugin for the MovableType blogging platform:

• Phil Windley’s MicroID Plugin for MovableType

There are also some open source MicroID verifiers out there. I’ve been around the identity community long enough to know that verify is a value-laden word - so I’ll clarify. These verifiers are programs that go out on the net and see if a MicroID embedded in a webpage is the same as a “claimed” MicroID. These verifiers are very important, as they start to pave a roadmap for how we might build systems of trust on top of MicroID. We’ve got verifiers in two languages, and hopefully soon we’ll expand to more!

• The first verifier is a Perl implementation by Fred Stutzman.
• The second verifier is a brand-spanking-new by Chris J. Roos.

So this is really exciting. Lots of tools for you to start looking at and playing with, thanks to everyone who took the time to create them. If I’ve missed anything, drop me a line at and let me know or post to the comments here. Also - if this inspires you to write a python, php or Java verifier - we’ll also be more than happy to add it to our list. I’ll be collecting links related to MicroID at http://del.icio.us/fstutzman/microid, so adding that feed may prove useful to you. We’re off to an exciting start here and we’re happy to have you along.

I’d like to welcome and as fellow stewards for MicroID.

I’m super thrilled to see the excitement and interest in MicroID. While I know that it is going to take a long time for fundamental technologies like this to evolve, having a few more people on the team with the passion and dedication like these guys will help our shared vision of an driven world grow even faster. Thanks guys!

Here’s somewhat of a personal manifesto for MicroID…

I am going to claim that the ultimate evolution of Identity isn’t in an identifier, but in the collection of the content you’ve produced or contributed to. You are your portfolio.

MicroID is the most fundamental unit of ownership and attribution. It connects content to a hidden but verifiable (by communicating with) identifier, and enables anyone to associate themselves with their content on any system supporting it. It is completely simple, completely decentralized, and completely transparent.

The holy grail of online Identity will be through the organic growth of identity-through-representation and systems that support the freedom of users to contribute, participate, and own content. MicroID is designed to facilitate those freedoms with a simple verifiable technology to enable edge portability and a network of attribution.