Manage your online identity.

Another feather for MicroID - and another automatically verified link for many of the users here at claimID.

This morning, Digg announced publication of MicroIDs on every user profile:

Digg already supports many of the open standards that let you use your data on sites other than Digg, including RSS, OPML, and hCard. We use RDF to embed the Creative Commons public domain dedication into each page. Just this week, we added MicroID, a Microformat that lets you prove to other services that you own your Digg user profile. We’ll be adding more open standards, such as OpenID, APML, OAuth, and XFN, in the coming months.

Again, just like last week, please check the list of Known MicroID Publishers and make sure your links are in the right format. Those trailing slashes are tricky sometimes.

Another notch on the MicroID belt.

Today we add Plaxo to the list of Known MicroID Publishers. Welcome, Plaxo! And thanks Joseph!

You can see it in action in the head of any page with the pattern http://NICKNAME.myplaxo.com/.

Plaxo will create and publish a MicroID for each of your verified email addresses in your account. You need to visit your settings page and claim your NICKNAME.

When you come back to your claimID account and claim your Plaxo profile page, it will be put in the verification queue automatically. Please note that since MicroIDs work with math done on URLs and identifiers, the URLs must be exactly correct. Please make sure that your myplaxo.com URL has a trailing slash when you enter it at claimID. (This also goes for the links pointing to Last.fm).

Another small step to taking over the world. We should congratulate ourselves.

The news today from Yahoo that it will be providing OpenIDs for all of their user accounts is a welcome sight.

Yahoo has been in attendance at the IIW for a while and been planning this for some time. Congratulations on getting the scale and legal issues worked out. And welcome!

Read more at openid.yahoo.com:

Once you enable your Yahoo! account for OpenID access, you can simply tell any OpenID enabled web site that you are a Yahoo! user. You will be sent to Yahoo! to verify your Yahoo! ID and password and then signed in to the web site. Its that easy!

They’ve got a nice easy explanation of the technology for users in addition to a ‘tour’. The developer network gets a page also. Very clean implementation, well done guys.

One interesting bit about their particular set-up, which will go live at the end of January - you only type yahoo.com into an OpenID box, not your full identifier. Yahoo will do the authentication and then bounce you back to the relying party. An interesting design choice - it will be interesting to see if that practice gains traction.

Update: This “yahoo.com only” is the directed identity feature of OpenID 2.0.

Another issue that’s generating some questions among ClaimID users is how to control one’s nickname when posting an OpenID comment to blogger. The nickname is what shows up as your name in the comment. Here’s are two examples of OpenID comments; the nickname is “Fred” in one, and “This shows up” in the second comment.

To accomplish this, first I leave a comment with my OpenID URL:

Once I do this, I am sent over to the OpenID server for authentication.  As you’ll notice, it asks me for some information:

Blogger is asking for your nickname, which is what will show up as your name in the comments.  As a test, I’ve given “This shows up” as my nickname.

Success!  Now I can control what nickname shows up when I comment.   Note, if you choose “Log in and Trust” this will set your nickname permanently unless you revoke Blogger’s trust, which you can do by managing your profiles at http://openid.claimid.com.

We’ve recieved a number of questions about this, so I thought it might be useful to post it to the blog. If you’re attempting to post a comment using an OpenID to a Blogger blog, you must prepend the http:// before your OpenID. For example, the following won’t work

But with the prepended http://, it will work:

Hope this helps!