<p>I&#8217;ve talked about <a href="http://alcidesfonseca.com/blog/83">OpenID</a>, <a href="http://alcidesfonseca.com/blog/172">CardSpace</a>, <a href="http://alcidesfonseca.com/blog/120">LiveID</a> and now I now came across <a href="http://microid.org/">MicroID</a>. It is not some single-sign-on service or a way of authenticating yourself, but a simple and tiny way of claiming some content.</p>

<p>It is a simple mechanism: you encrypt two <span class="caps">URI</span> ( usually your email address and the website of the service you&#8217;re using) and re-encrypt the concatenation of the two hashes. Then you display it as <span class="code">mailto+http:sha1:ca94387152e8ea62fee73c45c4bae79e54543485</span> and it&#8217;s ready to be claimed! Pretty hard? Well, you can always use the <a href="http://microid.org/code">libraries available</a> for Python, PHP, C#, Java and Perl.</p>

<p>This may sound a bit geeky and with no real life purpose, but in a world where social networks are popping up everyday, and you need some portability, this is pretty handy. One good example of the use of this technology is <a href="http://claimid.com/">ClaimID</a>, a online identity manager (openID enabled) that uses MicroID to check claims from the services you add to your profile, like <a href="http://ma.gnolia.com">Ma.gnolia</a>, <a href="http://wink.com">Wink.com</a>, <a href="http://jyte.com">Jyte.com</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us">del.icio.us</a>, <a href="http://last.fm">last.fm</a> and a lot more.</p>