I picked up a reference to a great idea by Stephen Downes over on Master New Media that I wanted to share. It's called mIDm

mIDm, pronounced "my dee me," is a little great idea to simplify online navigation and security - small idea, big results. It's the Mac factor - you make things more simple, and suddenly the results are huge. Simple is often more powerful.

mIDm is a self-identification network that supports single sign-on so that once you sign on, you never have to log in to other sites. Anywhere. And the key is that you sign on at your own website. It's kind of like the idea of asking your computer to remember your passwords or checking the "remember me" boxes on sign in sites - except, you retain control here. And there's no need to remember 20 different passwords, either.

You control your identity, your security, your privacy. It's not stored in some central database. You store it. You control your information - letting you change it whenever you please. And it's just as effective. You as still declaring that you are you and that your information is correct. And you can declare the level of security you use at the universal layer.

Billions of words have been written about user identity on the web. Numerous solutions have been proposed: to name a few, Passport, Liberty Alliance, LID, SxIP, PKI, CoSign and more...but no identity management solution has taken hold in any large measure on the World Wide Web...the vast majority of people, on the vast majority of websites, identity continues to be managed via a simple login with a username and a password...

What this does, in effect, is to establish a regime where a person's own declaration is the primary source of their identity, their own identity server; they do not need to depend on a proxy (such as a university registration, employment in a corporation, subscription to an internet service provider, or whatever)...

what mIDm is not is an authentication service. That is, websites have to take the user's word that they are who they say they are. But what it does do is to provide any user who wants it with a unique identity.

You can start reading more from Stephen Downes here.