Do you hate having to remember passwords, logging into lots of different services, each with a different password? User-centric identity is a fancy way to describe putting you in control of the logins and passwords required to authenticate your identity on different services; this is an idea that Technorati is fully behind. Technorati launched OpenID support in October 2007 for blog claiming and followed up with identity provider support two months later. This enables you to comment on LiveJournal blogs and log in to other services supporting OpenID as clients simply by being logged in to Technorati.
Since that time AOL, Wordpress, Vox and other great services have released their support for OpenID as well. Yesterday, I was very excited to see Eric Case post that Blogger is now supporting OpenID commenting! The more we can reduce the password-overload and identity fragmentation with all of these services we use, the better. I thought it might be helpful to show you how you can use your Technorati profile to authenticate for commenting on Blogger blogs.
First, you must be logged into Technorati to begin with. When you're reading a Blogger blog and want to submit a comment, look where the form says "Sign-in using" and select "Any OpenID".
The URL box that opens up just needs the URL for your Technorati profile, which has the form http://technorati.com/people/technorati/USERNAME. Put that URL in the "URL" box and hit the "Publish Your Comment" button.
The final step is to tell Technorati to permit Blogger to know that you're logged in to Technorati. You can grant that permission for the future so that Blogger can always get that confirmation from Technorati or make it a one-time access. Click "Set Permission" and you're done!
There are a lot of great resources and services available for learning about OpenID. I'm expecting 2008 to finally usher in the time when this stuff becomes more manageable. If there are other identity services that you would value as a Technorati user, please let us know!
