Timothy Post.com

The GHIN (Golf Handicap & Information Network) card pictured above is a generic sample of the card every serious golfer has in his/her wallet. It is also an example of a hand-rolled web badge. Click the image and you will be directed to the front page of www.ghin.com.

I have recently been updating my Flying Seeds blog and you might have noticed a number of hand-rolled badges appearing in the right-hand sidebar. There’s a couple badges for schools I’ve attended and badges for software I like and use.

However, it still amazes me that there is no web service which enables me to create professional looking web badges. This is the process I must go through to create one badge:

1. Do a Google Images search for the item in question
2. Go to the URL and “rip” the image off the screen (shift+command+4)
3. Go to my OS X desktop and rename the image file and change it to a jpeg file type
4. Open my Flickr account and upload the image
5. Make the image private so as not to gook-up my Flickr account
6. Open the image in Flickr and go to the “Different Sizes” section
7. Copy the HTML embed code
8. Open Blogger and navigate to the Elements section of the Customize menu
9. Paste the code into the Element box
10. Go the the website which I want the image to point to
11. Copy the URL
12. Delete the href URL in the Flickr embed code and paste the website URL
13. Through trial and error adjust the pixel size of the image
14. Put “center” tags at the beginning and end of the embed code

Can you believe that there isn’t a website which automates and improves this web badge creation process? I can’t either.

To make matters even worse, many of the images I must use for these web badges aren’t great. Often the photo quality is poor or the image is the wrong size for the space I want to paste it into.

Then there is the matter of customization of the image. Do you remember that “silly” little Seal Generator? That silly little code generator wasn’t actually that silly after all. That code generator let the user customize the “seal” with various images (worker, palm tree, sun, virgin mary, sports characters, ect), customize the colors and borders, and also it let users add whatever text they wanted to the badge.

Take a look at the GHIN card at the top of this page again. It’s static. I can use it for a badge but it’s just a generic card. I want a card with my name and golf club list. I want the same card that’s sitting in my wallet. Should I scan my physical card and then use that image. Perhaps. But it would be much better if someone were to create a Seal Generator (code generator) that could customize any image. Or how about the USGA email me an image of my actual card?

Unfortunately, that’s only half the battle. What about that URL I pasted into the href code? That URL is www.ghin.com. Again, no personalization. If I go to that website I can log-in with my GHIN number and go to my own account page. Here’s what that page looks like:

There should be a static link to that page (see above) provided by the USGA. That would be both interesting and useful.

This is just one very simple example of the current state of web badges. The potential of web badges is tremendous.

Remember Jason Kolb whose 5 part blog series I wrote about earlier today? Jason spent a lot of time writing about URIs being the basis for one’s online identity. I agree. What we need to realize is that every single web badge is just a URI dressed-up with an image. When we use del.icio.us or ThisNext or Style Feeder or MyPickList or any other visual social shopping bookmarking service we are just creating a portfolio of URIs.

Unfortunately, most all of the social shopping websites don’t let those URIs live without life support (i.e. I am not provided with the href HTML embed code). What I want is for those services to help me roll web badges with hrefs and images. Go back to Jason Kolb. Here’s what he said,

It wasn’t until just recently that I started re-looking at the URI. I’ve owned my own domain name for a while now, and use it for my personal email address Jason@jasonkolb.com and, more recently, for my blog. I thought it was cool that I controlled the content that lived at *my* domain name, and that I permanently owned it, but it didn’t really hold any value to me beyond that. However, recently I began combing thru the XMPP specs that make up the core of Jabber, and something dawned on me: URI can be used to get to ANYTHING. And ANYTHING is the key word here, because I’m not just talking about a blog, or email, or an instant messaging account. I’m talking about ANYTHING.

I challenge you to think of a single thing in the UNIVERSE which can’t be captured through a URI. Here’s one silly example. Right now, at 11:06PM Friday Septmber 8th, there is a single gondola sitting in the tram house at the top of Stowe Mountain. I can capture that gondola by taking a photo of it and posting it to Flickr. What about your dead Aunt Edna? Scan a photo of her into your computer and again upload it to Flickr. Anything.

As people begin to “put” more and more of their lives online they are going to need to find new and better ways to express themselves. Web badges will be at the center of that desire of self-expression.

Many of you reading this blog are very, very well positioned to capitalize on this newly emerging space of web badges.

// 09.08.2006 at 8:22 pm // Tagged webwidgets