Claiming your work in the online world

Last summer, I set up a ClaimID account but didn't do much with it. Prompted by Bill Drew's post on the Library 2.0 forum on his experiments with it, I decided to revisit my account and update it a bit. Coming up with categories to differentiate the many kinds of works of mine that are online proved a bit tricky. To distinguish between blogs and wikis that are authored by a group, I came up with "group blogs" and "group wikis;" for blogs and wikis that entirely my own, I settled on "solo blogs" and "solo wikis." There's more for me to add, but I see that this effort is turning into something of an online CV for me.

ClaimID suggests that you can use your ClaimID URL to logon to sites that allow for OpenID logon. I just did so to log in to my Ma.gnolia account, which has been dormant since February 2006 (I've been more committed to del.icio.us over the years). You can see a screencast about how OpenID works on the Read/WriteWeb site.

It's not clear to me if there's going to be a critical mass of web sites that adopt OpenID sign on, although some folks see that on the horizon. I'm a bit worried about security issues of having a single sign-on for all places where I have accounts. Although it is a pain to manage all of those user names and passwords, there is some security in having lots of different ones; if one is compromised, that doesn't compromise all the others. If my ClaimID user name/password is discovered, though, that would give someone access to all of my other accounts that allow for OpenID login, a rather frightening scenario.