Promote Yourself With a Globally Recognized Avatar

Yahoo’s MyBlogLog opened up a new stream for bloggers to gain traffic from. Web 2.0 plug-in Gravatar hopes its singularly focused product can take the model to the next level.Gravatar stands for “Globally Recognized Avatar,” and at its simplest level is an 80 x 90px avatar that appears on Gravatar-enabled Web sites when you visit them. The image will also appear next to your name when you leave a comment.

Yes, that’s all it is. But as you know; Sometimes the best ideas are the simple ones. And just like Yahoo gobbled up MyBlogLog, Automattic, the folks behind WordPress pulled the trigger on a deal to acquire Gravatar.

Aside from helping promote your blog, Web site or organization, Gravatar also makes it easy to spot comments from people on other blogs that you might be interested in reading.

Gravatar adheres to MPAA style ratings, restricting your site to only show Gravatars with content that you are comfortable with for your audience.

The Web site recently became 100% free after originally charging folks for multiple e-mail addresses additional uploaded. To setup Gravatar on your Web site you don’t even need an account. You do, however, need to add an “src” attribute that points to the Gravatar Image Generator.

Gravatar has been around for quite some time. It will be interesting to see how they will evolve with some serious money behind it.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.