If you're like me, by which I mean "human", you are profoundly sick of having to deal with passwords. Either you use the same one everywhere (bad idea) or you have a different one for every website stored conveniently on an easily lost or stolen list (differently bad idea). What if you really could have just password, or none at all?

The answer is OpenID. You can have one digital identity accepted at an ever-increasing number of websites. I created my OpenID at SignOn.com and now whenever I see the Open ID logo I know I can type in billba.signon.com and it will take me to my personal OpenID site to sign in with my (single) password. For extra credit you can signin without any password at all using an Information Card, but that's a topic for another day.

Now that I have an OpenID, my eye is seeing that friendly logo more and more places. I've been using it to sign into BaseCamp for some time, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that I could use it at LiveJournal to comment on posts.

The truth is we're a long way from just needing just one password, or none at all, but I believe OpenID will win the web one site at a time. And each one is one fewer password I need to remember, and that's a wonderful thing. And here's the best news of all - you may already have an OpenID! That's because you can now use your Yahoo! account as an OpenID. Learn more here.

Now go take on the web.

Update: Apparently the Yahoo! OpenID doesn't work with LiveJournal yet. Which just goes to show... something, I dunno. This whole movement is a work in progress.