The acceptance of OpenID in the blogger community is growing, which IMHO, is a great thing. Today, as I visited various Wordless Wednesday sites, I found more and more people using OpenID, and I appreciated being able to click on their links and go directly to their websites. Unfortunately, the Drupal implementation of OpenID doesn’t handle it quite as nicely.

One downside of this is that OpenID comments on Blogger do not show people’s gravatar. The problem is that gravatar’s are based on email addresses, and OpenID is based on website addresses. One solution would be if Gravatar would accept OpenIDs. Another solution would be if sites managing OpenIDs would support email addresses and connect with gravatar.

ClaimID.com seems like a perfect candidate for this. You can already verify your OpenIDs and your email addresses with them. If they would make email addresses available, as md5 hashes, then Blogger could connect to ClaimID to display gravatars. It would be a nice addition, and I’m sure there are a lot of other neat applications that could be created if there was a source of md5 hashed email addresses associated with OpenIDs.