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.