PUBLIC MARKS with search openid

For the most part, the movement that started with OpenID and OAuth is largely over. All the cool kids got grownup jobs and have been mostly missing. Think of the people you used to hear from on a weekly basis, and then try to remember when was the last time they had something new or provocative to say.

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I also realized just how destructive choosing standards as a career path can be. The standards world is very demanding and will suck every free minute you have. Most people contribute very little, and at the end, a handful of people end up carrying all the load. The problem is, no one wants to foot the bill for those suckers. Only a handful of very large corporations (mostly telecommunication and hardware) support employees doing standards full time, and mostly to serve their self-interest.

If all you had was an email address, would it not be nice to be able to have a mechanism to find someone's home page or OpenId from it? Two proposals have been put forward to show how this could be done. I will look at them and add a sketch of my own that hopefully should lead us to a solution that takes the best of both proposals.

The City of Nanaimo is not alone in recognising this global need. The US Federal Government has recently committed to embrace OpenID to allow simple access to citizen resources (http://openid.net/government/). As of November 2008, there were over 500 million OpenIDs on the Internet and approximately 27,000 sites had integrated the OpenID standard*. (* see - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID)