You’ve probably already heard of OpenID. For those of you who haven’t, it’s a new and upcoming standard for user authentication (and fellow Gizbuzz blogger Huw gave a nice introduction here).

I personally think OpenID is a great idea, and I’m a proponent of the idea and the standard. For a web development project I’m working on at the moment, we’re going to be using OpenID as the sole authentication system for users. That is to say, you will need an OpenID to actually sign up for the service and it will be the single system controlling your sign in.

There’s a problem though. The average computer user has never heard of OpenID, doesn’t really understand it and might be turned away from using this new service if they don’t very quickly ‘get’ how to sign up. We could have just shunned OpenID, built another proprietary username/password system and be done with it.

As a web service provider, though, I feel we have a responsibility to be pushing for new standards and helping spread OpenID. After all, it’s only through the widespread adoption of standards that the web is what it is today.

So we want to push OpenID and bring it to the forefront. What do we need to do?

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More and more applications are moving to run on the web. With online office suites like Zoho and Google Docs & Spreadsheets and many other services that traditionally have been the realm of the desktop moving on to the web, it seems like everything is going to the web.

One of the first things to actually make this move was email. It feels like webmail clients have existed forever. Hotmail was the startup (back before Microsoft owned them) that really brought webmail to mainstream use and since then we’ve seen many other services.

Most notably has been Gmail, which was one of the first mainstream webmail services to bring a user interface built on Ajax technology. This move (and other Ajax interfaces we now see in Yahoo Mail, the beta Hotmail interface and others) has brought the webmail experience pretty much on par with that of desktop clients.

So - with webmail services like Gmail providing such a rich user experience, are desktop email clients even relevant any more? If they are, are their days numbered?

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Read/WriteWeb has the story that Microsoft have launched a technology preview version of Silverlight, a competitor to Adobe’s Flash technology.

Today at the 2007 National Association of Broadcasters conference (NAB2007), Microsoft and Adobe have gone tit for tat with product launches that directly target one another. Our previous post covered Adobe’s launch of a new Internet video solution, that competes with Microsoft’s Windows Media Player. And Microsoft has fired right back, unveiling Microsoft Silverlight - a re-branding of their WPF/E technology (Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere). In its announcement, Microsoft describes Silverlight as a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering media and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web. So basically it is Microsoft’s equivalent to Adobe’s Flash.

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This is the first post on a series about challenges for the future internet and new media industries. Think of it as a todo list for web entrepreneurs - problems which need to be solved. Maybe Jason Calacanis could help himself to an idea!

We live in a widely heralded age of new media; anyone can put out a podcast, video or music track on the internet, and make it available to whoever wants it for next to no money, and in many cases hardly any time. Everyone’s doing it as well, right from Oratos with the Gizbuzz Podcast and PodDev to the BBC with From Our Own Correspondent and many other programmes.

What Oratos and the BBC have in common with regards to our publishing of rich media is that we both lack any tools to tell us any meaningful analytics concerning our publications. It is easy to find out how many times a file has been downloaded from your server from your logs. You can do an IP lookup and find out where any given downloader downloaded it from. But that’s about where the definite information ends. (more…)