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“Hello, my name is d4b8ba1042.” If the new crop of content ownership services has it’s way, this could be the way you identify yourself on the internet. While not the easiest to remember, unique identifiers based on personal information are a step closer to making it easier for authors to claim content which is, and which is not, theirs.
For the majority of people, adding identifying information to web pages, templates and blog posts is beyond their technical understanding or patience threshold. For now.
MicroID wants people to put this in their web page headers:
<meta name=”microid” content=”d4b8ba104277e7fb3591efe7dd98014a7235dc39″ />
Invisible to the naked eye, it allows search engines to find all conent that is marked as mine. What happens if someone else marks their stuff as mine, either by mistake or on purpose? If you can claim any web page or blog entry, what happens when multiple people claim the same page? Seems like this could be a problem similar to overzealous people editing others Wikipedia entries.
There are 26 David Evans in Massachusetts, we all get each other’s mail from time to time. Around tax time it’s especially unnerving. ZoomInfo has 200 matches for David Evans. This one is me. Originally it was riddled with inaccuracies that I had to fix. This blog is listed as mine, but the posts they reference are empty or taken out of context. Such is the result of relying on machines to catalog a person’s online identity.
CoComment functions similarly. It uses a bookmarklet to claim comments left on blogs. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve forgotten to click the link before posting, the frustration is annoying. Plug-ins for WordPress and Movable Type blogs are being developed to make the whole process easier.
ZoomInfo functions similarly to ClaimID. The difference is that ZoomInfo does the harvesting and everything else on the back end. It’s up to you to figure out what belongs to you and what doesn’t.
