A friend of mine has a blogspot blog that does not allow anonymous comments. I was curious what that little OpenID option was (I know I'm just so far behind the times!) so I looked into it and ended up reading this explanation by Sam Ruby. Note that his blog post is a year and a half old, so I truly am behind.

OpenID is service app that allows you to have a global ID on the internet. It's not for security or authentication but ties an OpenID to your email. That's it. I created an OpenID account called JulieLerman and it's associated with my email (only known to OpenID) so that I could claim my ID using their own authentication.

There's nothing to verify that I am indeed Julie Lerman. I could have made my ID booglyboo for all they care.

OpenID is also an open source project with open source libraries for developers who want to implement OpenID on their sites.

OpenID can be used on sites that host it, such as Blogger. There are a lot of sites hosting it now, which means that you don't have to sign up for their own particular user system .

And before you ask, no this website does not support it. We're on a MovableType system and don't have any rights on it beyond writing our blogs.

Additionally, OpenID allows sites to prevent totally anonymous comments. I can't see how it would prevent comment spam since spammers can have an openID account, too. I haven't look too deeply into it, but it felt harmless enough, even for this security and spam conscious skeptic.

But it does prevent link spam, or it reduces the value of link spam because the link goes back to your OpenID page, not your own URL. This is a great thing for reducing link spam, but I wonder if it's good for me as a blogger who comments on other's blogs. If I comment on your website and you want to see who the heck I am by following the link, but that lands you on julielerman.myopenid.com where you have to click another link to get to my blog, will you keep going or not?

Because its open source it will certainly get much wider adoption than Microsoft's LiveID (the new Passport", though I am very happy to use my LiveID account for the many different microsoft sites I use such as the forums or managing my MSDN Subscription. But OpenID has Google and Yahoo's seal of approval along with a lot of sites that are using it. The bar of entry to host it is fairly low.

For now, I was happy to be able to comment on my friend's blog and learn a little something new. So it's all good.