As of this morning, if you look below kthread posts, you’ll see lovely little pictures of yourselves.

These are called gravatars (for globally recognized avatar) and the groovy part is when you make one here (thirty seconds, tops) then your gravatar image will automagically appear when you post a comment on any blog that has gravatars enabled.

I’m using a Wordpress plug-in called WP-Gravatar, which lets me choose what will appear next to your name if you don’t have a gravatar.

All of you beautiful people (and you are) can either be different little geometric shapes (that’s what you are right now) or little monsters.

I picked the shapes for now, as they remind of a summer I spent thinking about emoticons and hieroglyphics with Professor David Golumbia at the University of Virginia (read his great, short piece on Gray Kid skewering megapharma here; more David, a video on genre, here)—now that was a great summer research assistant gig.

So what does your shape mean?

According to the identicon creator: “It’s a randomly generated assortment of shapes that is specific to a commenter’s email (or if you prefer IP address)…With 40 possible shapes (about 70 with inversions) in 3 possible positions, around 8000 distinguishable colors and four different rotations for each part, there should be several billion possible shape combinations.”

But, hey, if you’re more into monsters, let me know in the comments. We can switch it up.

I’ve also added openID, which is a way for you to keep the same username all over the internets. It’s a shared identity system to let you control how you log in where. You may already have one (your Flickr account is one); there’s a list here. You can also “claim” your blog in about five minutes; details in this tutorial.

And, just so you know, your comments make my day. I think of each one as a little satellite of love, orbiting around kthread; here’s to our next revolutions…

1. David Golumbia:
   July 10th, 2008 at 3:57 pm

   oh right, like i have a gravitar. a what?

2. Kristen:
   July 10th, 2008 at 4:00 pm

   Your identicon is lovely, David.

   Your gravatar could be of Scout!

3. David Golumbia:
   July 10th, 2008 at 8:50 pm

   oh, that’s my identicon. i like it. isn’t it cool how i used the open ID thing so accurately and spelled gravatar so correctly?

4. Kristen:
   July 10th, 2008 at 9:43 pm

   yes, I’m very impressed and happy that roles are reversed (so I am able to impart knowledge in this transaction).

   I think your identicon looks a bit like a Gee’s Bend quilt. Glad you like it–

5. Koral:
   July 12th, 2008 at 11:50 am

   Thanks for sharing this Kristen.

6. oso:
   July 21st, 2008 at 5:50 am

   I almost feel like cheating on my gravatar to get an identicon. Or, better yet, a monster.

7. Kristen:
   July 25th, 2008 at 10:44 am

   It is tempting, isn’t it? We’re switching to little monsters for a few days–

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Posted Thursday, July 10th, 2008, 8:46 am | Filed in Design, Technology. Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site.