Gravatars

You can notice those nice images next to the commenters of this blog? They’re called gravatars and they provide a way to use a common avatar which is attached to your email address(es) across the web. I’ve seen these for a long while but didn’t really care much to see whatever the hell was up with them until today.

According to the Gravatar website:

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

Samples:

They have a nice Wordpress plugin that can be installed in about two seconds. If you type really like really really fast.