Ben Sutton

Demo’ing blogging for Swadelands

Hi there, and welcome to my new OpenID themed blog. In the next few sentences I’d like to take the time explaining what OpenID is and how it benefits you. During the next few months I’ll be blogging about websites that start providing the option of identifying with OpenID and the news that comes along with that.

OpenID, in technobabble, is an open, decentralized framework providing digital identities for folks like you and me. What makes this useful? Well for starters, the word, ‘decentralized’ has a huge impact. Rather than simply having many overlords such as My Space, AOL and Microsoft providing a digital identity via their services, you can grab one from any provider. Because the OpenID network is, well, open, anybody can set up a server and provide IDs. So, this offers the obvious bonus, one username and passwords for the dotcoms that choose to adopt the system. Also, this allows for some cool things - such as your username becomes a universal resource identifier (URI). So, rather than ‘billybob33′, I can be known as, for example, ‘billybob.bloghost.com’. This advantage of this is that I now have an identity that points to an accessible resource where I can publish more information. Neat, huh?

That’ll do for the first post. Thanks for dropping by! In the next few posts I’ll explain the hows and whys and talk a bit more about the pioneers of OpenID.