How can I prove that I own this blog? Or for that matter any web page? Jeremie Miller of Jabber fame blogs about his new MicroID scheme that provides a simple way to assert ownership of web pages. I have just spent 2 minutes adding a MicroID to this blog. I now have the power to assert my ownership and have that automatically verified by anybody I choose without further changes. Cool.

Jeremie has really earned some extra bonus points for coming up with something so elegantly simple, as he describes it:

There is no new or deep technology involved, simply take a current communication id such as an email address and hash it with the name of the site it will be published on via the following pseudo-code:

MicroID = sha1_hex( sha1_hex( "mailto:user@email.com" ) + sha1_hex( "http://website.com" ) );

It really doesn’t get much simpler than that.