Reshma Kumar over at Webguild is reporting on Google’s upcoming launch of blogger based blog commenting that will support OpenID.   This is a great development and kudos to Google for again doing the right thing, which is making it easy for people to comment without having to do a separate login.   Also, along with Open Social, this approach is coming closer to the ideal online environment where you log in ONCE, and then interact in a robust way with all online environments and other onliners.   The analogy we should all be using is that of a massive party where everybody has a searchable name tag that contains all the info they care to share including pictures, writings, and resumes.    The complication is obvious here – some people will want to keep some things from some people.    I’m not sure how to manage that part since turning the info “on and off” does not work well in our cached and oft-downloaded online info environments.

Reshma notes:
 Users of OpenID-enabled services such as LiveJournal and WordPress can comment on a blog using their accounts from those sites rather than with a Blogger/Google account.

 This may not sound like much, but it will increase the ease of commenting on other people’s blogs.   I’m concerned by how blog commenting is becoming a dying art.   This is due to part to spam comments and in part to blogger selfishness where they don’t want to add to other’s blogs for a variety of SEO or ego reasons.      Ideally I’d like to see every person with their own blog, and then an auto-trackback feature so the conversations would span multiple blogs and instead of comments you’d just have dozens of interconnected blog posts on a topic.   However many people don’t want to have a blog but do want to participate.   This will help with that.