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Problogger just ran an article about a new service called OpenID (it’s actually a guest post by Yunching of YC’s Ramblings). The short story of OpenID is that it simplifies the log-in process in our busy internet lives (i.e., you don’t need to keep creating new accounts for each new website that you want to use).

The long story of OpenID is, well, longer. That’s why Problogger ran an article about it and that’s what these videos are for. So, go check out the Problogger article to learn how how OpenID can help you blog commenting and check out our videos to learn what OpenID is, how to use it and why you should care.

What is OpenID and How to use it

The first two videos are nice, clear demonstrations of what OpenID is and how to use it. Our first video is called OpenID Show from Simon Willison [Note: Simon has a number of posts about OpenID on his website which you may want to check out].

In this video Simon clearly explains what OpenID is and how to start using it. He also answers a number of basic questions that you may have concerning OpenID:

OpenID Show (05:45)

If you would like to actually make your website your OpenID URL (as Simon referred to in his video), then check out this article by Simon (in particular, note section 2 of the article).

Our second video is from Andrew of FlyPublishing.com.  In it he shows you how to sign-in to websites using OpenID.

How to login to sites using OpenID (04:54)

Using OpenID with Wordpress

For you Wordpress enthusiasts - you can integrate OpenID with your Wordpress blog [note: if you have a Wordpress hosted blog, then you already have an OpenID URL]. There are basically two ways that you can integrate OpenID with your Wordpress blog.

The first is that you can use your URL as a OpenID URL (like Simon referred to in his video above). You can do this manually (by following the instructions in Simon’s article or the instructions in this article. However, you could also just use this Wordpress Plugin.

The other way to integrate OpenID with your Wordpress blog is to allow visitors of your site with an OpenID URL to use that URL to login to your blog (assuming, of course, that you require people to login). To do that, you can use this Plugin. To understand how to setup and use this plugin, simply watch this video from Bwana McCall of Bwana.tv (the creator of this Plugin)

OpenID on Wordpress (04:43)

Why should you care?

By now you probably can see that OpenID can be a convenient way to sign-up to and log-in to various different websites. This clever little video from MyVidoop delves further into the benefits of OpenID (this one’s worth watching just for the cleverness of it):

OpenID According to Dave (04:34)

Finally, let’s return back to Simon Wilson to learn everything else we could want to know about OpenID. This video is a long one (almost an hour long). It’s a talk he gave at Google on OpenID. You don’t need to watch this video to know how to use it, but you may find it helpful in terms of understanding the benefits and uses of this (semi) new technology:

The Implications of OpenID (51:18)

OpenID Resources

Here is a list of websites and Plugins mentioned in this post:

• OpenID Foundation
• ClaimId.com
• MyOpenID.com
• AOL.com
• OpenID.Yahoo.com
• LiveJournal
• Wordpress
• WP-OpenID
• WP-Yadis
• Blogger
• MoveableType
• Vox
• VeriSign Labs
• MyVidoop.com