Manage your online identity.

Continuing our publicity tour around the UK, we see that ClaimID has popped up in a summary of news items about reputation management in The Times.  We were also pleasantly surprised to see ClaimID show up in Marie Claire, as discovered in the print edition by one of my family members.  Our empire expands everyday!

ClaimID and a number of other identity management were recently feature in the New Scientist article Don’t let cyber-spite ruin your good name.

So how can you protect your reputation online” Various companies are now offering to help, by managing what is written about you on the web. ClaimID, founded by Terrell Russell and Fred Stutzman, is a free service that allows users to collect, annotate and verify information that is either about them, or written by them, such as blogs, websites or news articles mentioning them. The result is a list of links to websites the users have approved. “You can think of it as an online link resumé,” says Russell.

This means that when people search for your name they will come across your ClaimID profile, which brings together all the online material you want. “The things that are about you online, the people you know, the contacts you make - they all equate to a reputation,” says Stutzman.

Check it out here!

A few days ago, we rolled out ID Selector at ClaimID. Designed by the wonderful folks at JanRain, ID Selector is a nifty technology that makes the OpenID sign-in process significantly easier. Here’s what it looks like:

The ID Selector makes it easy to recall your OpenID when you’re logging into a site, solving a plethora of problems that occur when OpenID’s proliferate.  We know this will make it easier for you to log in to OpenID, and we also hope that this will drive some more of that sweet OpenID-consuming that is required to push this movement forward.

If you’d like an ID Selector from your website, simply sign up with IDSelector.com.  Great work to Brian and Co. at JanRain!

The past year has been an exciting one for OpenID. Millions of OpenID’s have been created, thousands of sites support OpenID, and a growing ecosystem of fans, developers and advocates are proving that an open approach to identity makes sense. As the network of value around OpenID grows, our OpenID providers need to be trustworthy and secure. ClaimID has long been one of the most trusted OpenID providers on the net; while we offer banking-quality security, we felt it was time to take our product to the next level.

To do so, ClaimID will integrate Confident Technologies RecognitionAUTH system. The RecognitionAUTH system offers users an innovative and highly secure second factor in authentication. This enhancement will solve many of the criticisms of the OpenID security model, providing you with an account you can use with confidence going forward.

We’re excited to be working the the Confident/Vidoop team on this integration, particularly our friend and advocate Scott Kveton. In enhancing security, we hope ClaimID users will feel more comfortable, and more secure as they choose us as their identity provider. We hope to deploy RecognitionAUTH soon - so watch this space for more details.

Some great news from Micah Laaker of MyBlogLog - they’re now supporting MicroID’s on their profile pages.  If you’re a MBL user, you can now claim your page to ClaimID or any other service that supports MicroID.  Awesome!

Thanks to Adam Rice, who pointed out that our ClaimID Wordpress widget wasn’t valid XHTML. He sent along a handy fix, which we’ve added and uploaded. You can download the latest ClaimID Wordpress Widget (zip file) here . Thanks Adam!

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.

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!