Technorati Announces Support for Open ID

Blog search engine Technorati announced tonight that bloggers will now be able to claim ownership of their blogs with Open ID credentials and that more work in support of Open ID is on the way.

Open ID provides one URL you can use to identify yourself at all participating sites around the web. You can handle the logistics yourself or you can pay any number of different vendors to register your ID and resolve requests for information about you.

The movement to spread Open ID aims to make our lives easier, our data more secure and help users avoid closed silos from big vendors throwing their weight around unfairly. Ongoing and meaningful support for the standard by Technorati is a big deal. Add this to the body of forward looking work, like microformats, that’s going on at Technorati.

Many other vendors, including large ones like Microsoft, Oracle and SUN, are participating in Open ID discussions but for one of the major players in the new web community to make a tangible move like this will provide support for what’s all too often a fringe looking grass roots effort. When the more community oriented players in the Web 2.0 scene move first, then they can exercise greater influence over the landscape of the future.

As the Technorati blog post points out, other vendors supporting Open ID include trailblazers LiveJournal and Six Apart’s Vox.

For more information and background on Open ID, see the Berkman Center’s IdentityGang.org, this interview I did with Open ID evangelist Kaliya Hamlin in July and the Wikipedia entry on Open ID.