OpenID: Portland's word of the day

If I had to pick a word-of-the-day for Portland tech today, it would be easy. Today, that word would be "OpenID." (Okay, so it's not really word, but you know what I mean.)

Why OpenID? Well, many of us around the Portland tech scene recognize that Portland has something special when it comes to OpenID. But it's not often that we have day with so much OpenID stuff happening.

Today, Portland was OpenID crazy:

1. JanRain announced the launch of their OpenID ID Selector, a widget which brings OpenID out of its geeky hallows and into a more mainstream application.
2. The new Portland-based spinoff of Vidoop, ConfIdent Technologies, announced a major partnership with three leading OpenID providers.
3. David Recordon, one of the original developers of OpenID, was in Portland, hosting a geek lunch.

All of which led Portland's Marshall Kirkpatrick, lead blogger at ReadWriteWeb, to state:

Already the home of the inventor of the wiki (Ward Cunningham), the initiator of the Linux kernel (Linus Torvalds), a boatload of RSS and OpenSource-heads, Portland Oregon is also becoming a hotbed of OpenID work.