I’ve always liked the idea of the icon-as-avatar for a discussion, and feel that it adds to the sense of community about a discussion, but always avoided it because:

1) local avatar systems are a pain-in-the-ass with low incentive for commentors to setup, and there wasn’t a global system with the breadth of adoption to make using it worth it.
2) global systems add additional points-of-failure and load time to pages

When the Wordpress guys bought gravatar.com and did a bunch of work to make it supa-fast, I got interested. And, of course, the native support in WP does suggest that there will be a large pool of active commentors in the world who will have already set it up. That sort of mitigated against my concerns.

Then, when they rolled in the Identicon stuff, I had to do it because that kind of algorithmic shit fascinates me.

Mostly, though, I did it to mess with YOU.

(Did you see what your identicon was going to be, btw? It’s a pretty cool red one: .)

(Also in a ditch-digger, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Of course, you had an Identicon before, it just didn’t suggest anything to me–it looked like this:

Also, just for fun I checked what mine would have been–it’s actually pretty cool:

Well, when I have more time I may tweak things–

And yes, Alex, your visage is now visible.