[Microid] MicroID hashing algorithm(s) and normalization

Chris Roos chrisjroos at gmail.com
Sat Dec 9 04:02:26 EST 2006


On 11/28/06, Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter at jabber.org> wrote:
> Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> > Evan Prodromou wrote:
> >> On Tue, 2006-28-11 at 14:00 -0700, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> >>
> >> I think we care about associating people with resources. I think making
> >> claims to user accounts on different services is a great use case, but
> >> it's definitely not the only one.
> >
> > Let me see if I understand. Here is Fred's example:
> >
> >> Now imagine I have two claimID-like services.  In one I wish
> >> to claim my general web reputation (so I would claim
> >> http://del.icio.us/fstutzman) and in the other I wanted to
> >> claim my facebook-specific reputation (so I would claim
> >> http://del.icio.us/fstutzman/facebook).  These are both
> >> valuable points of my reputation.
> >
> > What are these claimID-like services? Do you have a different identity
> > at each one? Let's say you have these two provider URLs:
> >
> > 1. http://general.example.org/fred
> >
> > 2. http://facebook.example.net/fstutzman
> >
> > So delicious mashes up the following to generate microids:
> >
> > 1. http://del.icio.us/ + http://general.example.org/fred
> >
> >    microid: 9c55b9b46b3033908469c746c4bf0b826953eb07
> >
> > 2. http://del.icio.us/ + http://facebook.example.net/fstutzman
> >
> >    microid: c5b54608ed5f76fa1573e818dfab9e1227109fec
> >
> > Now delicious can plunk 9c55b9b46b3033908469c746c4bf0b826953eb07 in any
> > page that relates to your general web reputation (who cares what the URL
> > is?) and c5b54608ed5f76fa1573e818dfab9e1227109fec in any page that
> > relates to your facebook persona.
> >
> > If the microid is different for every URL then I don't see how anyone is
> > going to usefully do things like spider all of delicious to find every
> > page that relates to your general web presence as opposed to your
> > facebook presence (or all the pages on wikitravel that Evan has edited
> > or whatever).
>
> Really I do get it. URIs are opaque. If a certain provider wants to
> assign a general meaning to microids at that provider's service, then
> they can normalize down to <http://del.icio.us/> in generating microids.
> But if another provider doesn't want to truncate down to the authority
> component they don't have to -- it won't be possible to use microids at
> that provider's service in the same general way, but they may have more
> particular uses in mind.
>
> Let a thousand flowers bloom!
>
When I started reading this thread I was with Fred et al in agreeing
that the uri of the resource should be hashed to form part of the
microid.  I then switched to agreeing with you: the uri of a resource
is just a shared key, it doesn't matter what is used as the key as
long as people know what to use.  The fact that a given microid
appears against a page or some content on a page (and more
importantly, not in others) is actually what's important.  However, it
seems that you've now understood something that I'm missing, because I
got lost on your point above.  I wonder if you wouldn't mind
explaining it to me?

Cheers,

Chris

> /psa
>
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