Avatars? Isn't that some kind of D&D comic book stuff?
My previous post dug into using the Gravatar service to add avatar images to your community website. Afterwards, I realized that I didn't really make the case for why you should care about avatars. Yeah, the word avatar may make you think of fantasy gamers jabbering about Yoda's lineage on some forum.
Not so! All the cool kids1 are using avatars!
Gravatars make the comments on Scott Hanselman's blog (running on dasBlog) more interesting:
Gravatars spice up the comments on Phil Haack's SubText blog:
And check out how Gavin's made extensive use of Gravatars in DotNetKicks:
So don't let the "avatar" thing throw you - this is about making websites look like conversations between people rather than documents stuffed with boring text.
1 For small values of cool? Maybe I need to get out more.