Gravatars are “globally recognized avatars” and are becoming more common among blogs, just as avatars have been around for a while especially on phpbb and other forums or on livejournal type social blogs. They are 80×80 pixel images (a variety of formats are supported, including the usual web suspects) and are rated (so that weblog owners could choose to block more violent or sexual images from blogs used by children, for example). Each gravatar is based on a md5 hash of the owner’s email address. When that address is used in a comment, the gravatar can be retrieved and displayed with the comment.

So I went and made myself a very simple gravatar, using the general theme from this blog and tried it out. It’s been fun seeing where it will appear — and I certainly didn’t expect to have Technorati start showing it in my little Technorati script but there it is, at the bottom of my sidebar! Half the fun has been seeing where the little critter will pop up.

For more social bloggers, this seems like a nice way to put a face to a name and for others, it seems like a good way to further nudge a bit of name/logo recognition one’s way.

And yes, of course there’s more than one Wordpress plugin for gravatars. There’s one that seems to have been the gold standard but is not working now and has been updated (or branched if you prefer) with this version which has been recently overhauled and among other things which tries to be nice to the gravatar server by caching local copies. The gravatar site itself provides this extremely simple one which simply retrieves the image directly from its servers. (It works fine in WP 2.0.)

A related one is a gravatar signup plugin which encourages people to sign up for a gravatar on the spot, simplifying the process.