Chris Messina pointed me to claimID, an interesting service that allows you to gather your various accounts (Flickr del.icio.us, etc.) into a single public list of “verified” identities.
My claimID profile is here – I haven’t verified all of the sites/accounts I’ve added yet, and I’ve probably forgotten a half dozen sites/accounts I should add, but it’s kind of cool to have a list of everything in one place. I think I’ll add a link to this on my About page.
This is a pretty interesting service to me, because I think it’s a little ahead of its time for a lot of folks. Of course if you’re relying almost entirely on external services for your online persona, this might be something you want to use now.
I grabbed an account a while back, but I didn’t really follow through too much with this. And I think that you’re right about external services … I essentially do the same thing with the sidebar of GFMorris.net. [That’s not just for show … that’s my entry point for so many places that it’s not funny. I’m not just providing my stalker(s) with fodder to find me.]
I like the fact that you get an openid account when you sign up. It would be cool if they had some more tools to integrate this data with your own web site.