Personal Tags - tagging your content with a unique string | Hacker News Reader

Personal Tags - tagging your content with a unique string

id-o.de

15 pointsfbailey12 comments

Just use your own name. There is no functional difference.

There is another Joel McCracken somewhere, a principal of some school somewhere. However, my full name, "Joel Nathan McCracken", has not been taken. I've been thinking about beginning to use it in various places.

edit: one issue with this approach (or any similar approach, for that matter) is that it isn't easy to find the spot on the page where your name appears. A user would have to cmd+f your tag to figure out what you said, if they are interested. A better approach might be adding a link to the tag, but there are problems with that too -- places don't/shouldn't allow html content in their comments.

In any case, its a good issue to bring up.

I toyed with the idea of doing something like this ages ago, but decided against it. I felt it would become something akin to signing things, and it's open to the equivalent of forgery. What's to stop someone from creating content you don't agree with, and then putting your tag on it?

To partially offset that you could create a page under your control that has a link to every page with a verified personal tag. Use Google alerts to send you the links automatically, and anything you don't recognise, check it out. Have an "I refute ..." or "Name and Shame" section to highlight those occurences that are not legitimate.

that's a nice and simple solution, I might do this in the future. Since I wanted to extract the data from google and set up a list with links to all my content I could easily decide to not include spam, false comments or just things I'm ashamed of afterwards ;)

Of course the verification problem is basically the same now, anybody could sign a comment with my name. #ptfjib80

"What's to stop someone from creating content you don't agree with, and then putting your tag on it?"

You could digitally sign it using secure private key (and if you want to be really secure store the private key on a secure hardware device). Use a X509 cert from a well known CA and pretty much anyone can check whether you wrote it or not.

I'm saying this is a good idea though....

Damn - now I have to go and work out how I would implement this....

The trick would be to have a nice combination of a tag (which is always the same) and a digital signature that binds your tag to the content.

You could also make it your username when you have to sign up for something.

This reminds me of blackhat SEO techniques! (see http://www.nigritudeultramarines.com/), nevertheless +1 very neat idea!

I agree!

{241C6C98-C3BA-4C22-A91C-1811B79DB6E8}

Seriously, can you imagine everyone doing that in every comment here, for example? It would get annoying real quick.

I agree, but it's pretty easy to get all my comments out of HN anyway, because I have a dedicated account here. It's more useful for distributed content on sites where I just post one or two comments.

In a second step it would be pretty simple for HN or any other site to just give me a field to enter my personal tag and add it to every comment (maybe in grey behind the username).

A small overhead for a small gain. Neat idea.

If this idea catches on, you will have to watch out for spam though.

There's no need for it to be a random string. For instance, #ptgavinb gets 0 google hits.

what about having a keyboard-listener on your machine who saves every input you make?

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