One good way of telling whether anybody means it is to see whether they are willing to spend money on it. Well, we are. A group of companies, including VeriSign, JanRain, Cordance, ooTao, Opinity (added, my apologies in missing you guys earlier), Four Kitchen Studios, Zooomr, claimID, Sxip, Six Apart, and us at NetMesh have a created a pool of money that we’ll give away to people who join us in in the mission to make URL-based digital identity ubiquitous.

To qualify for one of the 5000 dollar bounties, all you have to do is to OpenID-enable a well-established open-source application. The first 10 projects get 5000 dollars each. (The exact rules are at IWantMyOpenID.org.)

I’m really looking forward to seeing what will happen. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever done this kind of thing for this kind of technology. But we’ve run the idea through committers on a number of potential open-source applications for this, and the feedback generally has been very favorable. So, I why don’t you get started today, the race is on! ;-)