“I may have a sign-up obsession and belong to hundreds of sites, but normal people just don’t.”

Bang on, Mike.

BUT I am all for a one log-in approach. I have bitter experience of trying to encourage people to adopt web tools only to find they have forgotten the username/password they assigned themself and ask ‘can you just email me instead?’ thus defeating the object and missing out on the benefit of the tools.

But you’re right, trying to explain to people the concept of OpenID is not going to help in cases like this.

I wonder if the proposed development of TLDs will help. Selling the concept of OpenID (unique URI instead of email) is the tricky thing but if we had URIs that didn’t end .com (and then described them as ‘identities’ perhaps rather than URIs) that might be a step in the right direction.