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.