Sxip

I've been hearing a lot about OpenID the last six months, probably because Sxip and Bryght have a local presence. It's a cool technology solving a problem I certainly deal with day-to-day. But will it rise from the primordial idea soup into mainstream acceptance? According to Simon Willison, yes:

When Bill Gates stands up at a security conference in America and spends seven minutes on stage talking about a technology, it's not really a niche proposition anymore.

Wilson recently gave a talk that was converted into a "slidecast": http://simonwillison.net/2007/Mar/12/slidecast/. It does an excellent job, the best I've seen to date, of explaining OpenID and the problems it's meant to solve. I appreciated his inclusion of a "What's wrong with it?" section. And it's not without humour, we're introduced to the evil alter egos of Ben and Mena Trott!