MicroID Plugin for WordPress

Posted on March 30, 2006 by Richard K Miller

I recently learned about MicroID, a microformat for verifying ownership of content on web pages, from a post on Phil Windley’s blog. MicroID, which is a simple hash of an email address and a URL, can be used to claim ownership of a blog, a blog post, or a blog comment.

Phil developed a MicroID plugin for MovableType.

Likewise, I created a MicroID plugin for WordPress [zip].

This WordPress plugin does three things:

Inserts a MicroID meta tag in the head of your blog. This is calculated from the administrator email and the blog URL listed in your WordPress blog’s General Options.
Attaches a MicroID to each post. This is calculated from the email address of the author of that post (which may be different if your blog has multiple authors) and the permalink of that post.
Attaches a MicroID to each comment. This is calculated from the email address and URL submitted with each comment.

This a very new concept with little practical application so far, but the possibilities are interesting: “Blog comment systems can check the given email address against a MicroID from the entered home page link to help reduce link spamming and blatant spoofing.” (microid.org)

Same weather, two forecasts

Posted on March 28, 2006 by Richard K Miller

My cell phone has rudimentary access to weather information, through both The Weather Channel and AccuWeather. When I recently looked at the forecast, The Weather Channel said “partly cloudy” for several days. On AccuWeather, those same days were labeled “partly sunny”.

Two forecasts for the same weather, one pessimistic and one optimistic. Guess which service I’m going to keep checking?

“Let Everyone Have Ideas”

Posted on March 27, 2006 by Richard K Miller

Rite-Solutions encourages employees to innovate through an imaginary stock market:

“They focus on an internal market where any employee can propose that the company acquire a new technology, enter a new business or make an efficiency improvement. These proposals become stocks, complete with ticker symbols, discussion lists and e-mail alerts. Employees buy or sell the stocks, and prices change to reflect the sentiments of the company’s engineers, computer scientists and project managers — as well as its marketers, accountants and even the receptionist.”

Source: New York Times

What can’t you find in 30 seconds or less?

Posted on March 27, 2006 by Richard K Miller

Insightful quote by Mark Cuban, advocating intellectual self-sufficiency:

“In the past, you had to memorize knowledge because there was a cost to finding it. Now, what can’t you find in 30 seconds or less? We live an open-book-test life that requires a completely different skill set.”

Source: ZDNet.com

Business creativity

Posted on March 27, 2006 by Richard K Miller

Seth Godin’s post on Real Creativity resounded with me, because it debunks off-the-cuff comments like “it would be cool if [outlandish idea]” or “why don’t you [outlandish idea]?” as business ideas. (It’s okay to dream — I’m just saying that undeveloped dreams don’t make good business ideas.)

His summary is that “real business creativity comes from boundaries.” 37signals has been advocating the virtues of constraints for a long time. Seth is saying that dreaming up something so outlandish that it can’t be implemented isn’t creative.

I disliked the movie Van Helsing because it seemed that all the characters could fly, shoot laser beams, and come back from the dead. The lack of constraints was frustrating.

Figuring out a better way to do your job (intrapreneurship), on the other hand, IS a form of creativity.

Seth’s Blog: Real creativity