This post was imported from my old Drupal blog. To see the full thing, including comments, it's best to visit the Internet Archive.
I (“Jeni Tennison”) manage to score 10/10 on the online identity calculator, thanks to having a pretty rare name and there being multiple archives of XSL-List, to which I was a prolific contributor in my early XML days. (I think I can also claim to be “Jenni Tennison”, “Jenny Tennison” less so, “Jenifer Tennison” is obviously the pre-XML me, and “Jennifer Tennison” not me at all, and quite rightly so.)
Anyway, I’ve just registered with claimID to get myself an OpenID, to lower the barrier to accessing certain sites. As well as getting a claimID URL (eg http://claimid.com/jenitennison) to use as an OpenID, you can also use the URL of your own web page as your OpenID identity URL which delegates to the claimID identity URL, by adding links to the claimID server in the head of the web page. (View the source of my home page to see what this looks like.) This provides some flexibility in the event that claimID stops functioning: I can move to another OpenID provider without changing my OpenID.
ClaimID uses microID to verify that the pages that you say you own are really pages that you own. A microID is a hash of your email address and the URI of the page, placed in a <meta> element in the head of the HTML page (or in the class attribute of a section of a page). It bothered me for a bit that other people could easily create this hash and put it on their own pages, claiming that I’d created them. Then I realised that microID’s for confirming your claim that you own a page, not for discovering who owns a page (the hashing algorithm is non-reversible), and the only person who can claim a given page (at least on any reputable site) using the email jeni@jenitennison.com is me.
So now I have to work out how to get Drupal to add the hash into the head of my blog pages, and to enable OpenID and microID for people who post comments.