How to spice up your online identity with Gravatars

by Brad Grier on June 15, 2008

in Blogging,How to,Web

This is actually an Identicon delivered by Gravatar, so it's an Avatar of a particularly cool flavour.If you’ve ever read a post on a blog and noticed a small photo or image asso­ci­ated with each author, or asso­ci­ated with authors of com­ments, then you’ve seen an ‘avatar’.

A few years ago, Gravatar launched as a way to allow people to store an avatar in a single loc­a­tion, and it would auto­mat­ic­ally be used on blogs util­iz­ing Gravatar technology.

The way it works is you simply cre­ate a Gravatar account, provid­ing the email address you want to asso­ci­ate with your avatar, and upload your avatar image.

The magic hap­pens behind the scene when you cre­ate a post or com­ment. The blog you’d just com­men­ted on looks up your email address on the Gravatar server and provides the image on file.

If you want to update your avatar, just change the image at Gravatar and you’re done…everywhere Gravatar-supporting site you ever left a com­ment at will use your update image.

As an aside, I use Gravatar here. Leave a com­ment and if you have a Gravatar avatar, you’ll see it appear. If you don’t have one though, you’ll see a very cool kil­a­de­scope pat­tern called an ‘identicon’. This is another Gravatar fea­ture that cre­ates and stores unique, math-based avatar images for folks without avatars. The idea is that every­one gets an image…consistant with their online identity.

Very cool, and com­munity build­ing too boot!

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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Rajeev Edmonds June 15, 2008 at 4:57 am

Gravatar were introduced few years back, but was not promoted aggressively at that time. Now it’s catching attention of large numbers of users in blogosphere.

Rajeev Edmondss last blog post..Blog Marketing And YouTube: An Introduction

2 Brad Grier June 15, 2008 at 4:31 pm

Hi Rajeev,

Indeed! With more users wanting to participate in more online communities, yet retain their unique identity, Gravatars seem a logical option.

Brad

Brad Griers last blog post..How to spice up your online identity with Gravatars

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