Recently Dion and I gave a talk at O’Reilly’s well-produced Web 2.0 Expo conference.

We messed up. Let me explain.

Last fall, on a lark, we wrote a quick program that would buzz at random intervals. We finished it right before walking on-stage to give a keynote at The Ajax Experience and ran it with the rule that whenever the buzzer sounded, we had to instantly switch speakers. Folks loved it, so on occasion we’ve been repeating the buzzer thing.

We did it at Web 2.0 Expo, but this time, the crowd was not amused. A sampling of the feedback on the conference site:

Thought [the talk] was great…except…hated the random buzzer bit. I can appreciate adding some fun…but…a little silly at first and eventually really irritating.

The the random buzzer was really terrible, distracting and loud. It was funny for about 1 minute. Doing it for the whole presentation just didn’t make sense.

Maybe the volume was higher than it has been in times past? Maybe we had the maximum interval set too high? In any event, I went to apologize in the comment thread when I was presented with… the dreaded login:

Time to create my 501st Internet credential; but wait! They support OpenID!

I’ve been hearing lots about how I can use my existing Google credentials to login to websites that support OpenID. I couldn’t wait to take advantage of that here. So I click on the “Use an OpenID to sign up” link and with the magic of a cross-fade technique, I see this:

I’ve no idea how this stuff works, so I clicked on the “Read more about OpenID” link; a pop-up window opened:

First thing I did was click on “Check against this list” to see if I already had an OpenID as I thought I might. Doh! Error:

No problem, URLs get mangled from time to time. This one seems to have an obvious problem:

http://wiki.openid.net//Public_OpenID_providers#Other_Services_Providing_Identity_Services

I removed the extra forward-flash after “wiki.openid.net” and then got this page:

That’s right; to find out how to avoid creating a login for the O’Reilly site, I have to create a login for the OpenID wiki site. Of course.

The other links on the pop-up were equally useless and/or broken.

At this point I just went ahead and tried my Google login id:

Rats. I googled around a bit and found this page:

Sweet! I have a wordpress.com account, so I tried that:

OpenID, I hate you! Still, perhaps there’s light at the end of the tunnel.