A while ago now, Jeremy Keith released Huffduffer a new social bookmarking site specifically for audio files, which turns your 'huffduffed' links into a convenient personalised podcast for you to subscribe to. I signed up to Huffduffer immediately after hearing about it - not because I wanted to use it (I still haven't huffduffed anything), but because I knew Jeremy would be using his extensive interest in and knowledge about microformats, machine tags and other beautiful web things while building Huffduffer, and I wanted to be inspired.

Huffduffer is the first site I saw actually using XFN and Google's Social Graph API to automatically link to a user's profiles around the web. I entered my blog address and bam, links appear to Delicious, Twitter, Flickr, Last.fm, Friendfeed, etc. Awesome!

Then this week, Glenn Jones released Ident Engine, a javascript library for utilising a huge variety of social graph data and other semantic data available all over the web through various APIs.

Without much conscious thought, most of us have built identities across the web. We've filled in profiles, uploaded photos, videos, reviews and bookmarks. The Ident Engine uses semantic web API’s to bring together these web footprints.

I had to use it for something. I've only scratched the surface of Ident Engine's capabilities, but here's something to start with: a plugin for Habari.

Plugin

Comment Ident uses Ident Engine and the URL left by users who comment to find the user's various web profiles and display them to a visitor.

The plugin is currently only available for the latest development build of Habari (soon to be version 0.7), if you're running 0.6.x, sorry you'll have to wait and/or upgrade. To use it:

• Download it from here or check it out from habari-extras
• Install and activate in the usual Habari way
• Add the class 'ident' to any links you want to use for finding profiles (usually in your theme's comments.php template)
• Sit back and enjoy/file bug reports

Still wondering

Still wondering what it actually does? It does this.