November 29th, 2005

Domain as Identity?

by Joshua Porter  |   11 Comments

Over time Bokardo has slowly become my online identity. It’s where I write, where people can contact me, where people subscribe to my feed, and where search engines crawl. Everything that I do goes through this domain in one way or another, either with a pingback or a link to.

Also, in true Semantic Weblike fashion, my domain has become the index for all the services that I offer. (the idea that I provide services sounds funny, but it’s not hard to think of an RSS feed as a service).

Here are my “services”:

  • RSS service ( http://bokardo.com/feed/ )
  • HTML service ( http://bokardo.com/ )

I’m trying to learn more about RDF, so I added an service built out of RDF just this morning:

  • FOAF service ( http://bokardo.com/foaf.rdf )

Adding this service was easy. I went to the FOAF-a-Matic and created the RDF file and uploaded it to the root of my web server. Then I stuck the following in the head tag of my HTML template:

<link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF" href="foaf.rdf" />

Alternatively, I’m working on several more services:

  • OPML service
  • Sitemaps service

These services will all be discoverable by looking at the index of Bokardo. Over time, I’m sure we’ll have a lot more services to add to the mix, some that will prove very useful, and some that won’t. Kind of gives the index page a little more oomph, huh?

In essence, I’m making my domain my identity. It sounds reasonable, does it not?

Comments ( 11 Responses so far )

1.  CM Harrington on November 29th, 2005 (Comment) #

“In essence, I’m making my domain my identity. It sounds reasonable, does it not?”

Perfectly! Your space *is* your online identity, and everything should be interconnected. Ideally, all such interconnected sites have a similar look and feel (part of your own personal “brand identity”). Having a personal “brand Identity” may sound a bit lame, but really, what you are doing is telling people: “this information comes from me, and I am someone with whom you can trust”. It builds credibility.

Oh, and awhile back you mentioned I should write more. I have been. Thanks for kicking me in the pants. I needed it.

2.  - on November 30th, 2005 (Comment) #

It seems you might enjoy following some of the links found in http://www.identitygang.org/Reference… about user-centric identity.

3.  cori on December 3rd, 2005 (Comment) #

Have you thought about including an actual ID service related to your domain? Something like LID?

Also, I supply an OPML version of my WordPress blog. I plan on making it more of a plug-in and less of a template, but you can check out the version I’m running right now here.

4.  Josh on December 3rd, 2005 (Comment) #

Cori…thanks! I hadn’t yet delved into the OPML creation tools, but I was hoping on finding a WP plugin once I did. Cool.

I’ll check out LID, too. That sounds interesting.

5.  /pd on December 3rd, 2005 (Comment) #

Yes, the blog is a reflection of yourself. Its your space and unique to you. Todays thought leaders so that if you don’t have a web identity, then tomorrow your toast. Early adopters have the ability to be ahead of the curve.

For ompl , am playing at opmlmanager.com
You can import and export your feeds. I for one would like to troll your blogroll :)-

6.  Bill on December 10th, 2005 (Comment) #

Ofcourse the domain name is identity or it’s helps to uncover the identity of it owner. The domain name caryies sense of web site content or company’s main line

7.  Chris Messina on August 15th, 2006 (Comment) #

Have you checked out ClaimID? Their service is more or less based on this notion. They also support XFN and microID, which can be useful for expressing places elsewhere on the web that are also “you”.

8.  Terrell Russell on August 15th, 2006 (Comment) #

As well, once you have an OpenID, you can ‘delegate‘ your domain to serve as your OpenID URL - allowing you the ability to leave comments, edit wikis, etc. - all with a single sign-on (to all OpenID-enabled sites).

If your site were accepting OpenID comments right now, I could leave a verified comment here - just by putting in my own homepage or blog address.

And as a side note - your claimID *is* an OpenID, so you could use it directly, even if you didn’t own your own domain.

Terrell
http://claimID.com/terrell

9.  Pari on January 15th, 2007 (Comment) #

I have recently tried that claimID, it is really awesome, makes blogging so much easier…

10.  Stuart Yeates on February 21st, 2007 (Comment) #

claimID is NOT a match to this concept. claimID:
(a) assumes that a reader is human rather than a machine (no machine readable RDF)
(b) only talks to claimID and microID websites (very well, admittedly)
(c) assumes that it’s own OpenID is your primary OpenID URL.

cheers
stuart

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Bokardo is the blog of Joshua Porter, a web designer/developer, researcher, and writer. I live in Newburyport, MA, USA.

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