Martin Atkins

I'm Martin Atkins, and I'm a British geek living in San Francisco.

martin.atkins.me.uk is my main personal site, but I also have a long-form blog which is all about tech stuff and a photo and notes blog which is often more personal.

I grew up right on the west edge of London in a suburban town called Uxbridge. Once I flew the nest I spent the next few years out in Colchester, Essex, and then ultimately moved to San Francisco where I now work for the blogging company Six Apart, designing and implementing the public API for the professional blogging platform TypePad.

I helped to create OpenID and served on the founding board of directors that helped to bootstrap the OpenID Foundation. I am currently working on the emerging Activity Streams specification as editor and co-author as well as contributing to the WebFinger and PubSubHubbub specifications, amongst others. I'm enthusiastic about technologies that enable the social web to blossom in a decentralized manner where everyone — from large corporations to individual geeks — can work and play together.

I attend various conferences about the emerging technologies of the social web, and particularly enjoy the collaborative nature of so-called "unconferences" where folks from various facets of our industry come together to solve interesting problems in innovative ways.

I also enjoy hiking, camping, bouldering and canoeing, all of which are far more enjoyable in the California climate than in the English one.