Commenting on blogs outside of your chosen host can sometimes be a frustrating business. Blogger has certainly
been testing my patience lately. I used to be able, where the blog owner had allowed, to leave comments linked back to my WordPress blog and then it changed again and I could only comment anonymously or via my Google login which linked back to a previous defunct blog hosted on Blogger that I used to post to. Now finally (again only where the blog owner has allowed) I can comment on Blogger from a narrow clutch of different blog or other Internet identities including WordPress with the ability to use my openID login if required. Thanks Blogger, it’s good too see you realise that many of us want to comment on and receive comments from blogs hosted on platforms other than our own chosen blog host though this is more restrictive than an option that had been in place previously.
I hope other blogging and social networking sites continue to allow a greater degree of comment transparency.
Up the hill backwards 
This annoys me too and I am surprised to see so little reaction to it. I was about to post on this very subject when I discovered the Typekey thing and this distracted me.
This reinforces my contention that when a big company acquires others and spreads its tentacles across the board, this is not always (or even often) a good thing. Google is showing the paranoia of big enterprises. It doesn’t like to admit that there are blogs other than Blogger.
The problem with WordPress OpenID is that the name is the name in the URL of your blog. In my case, that is tigergrowl whereas the name I would wish to use is obviously SilverTiger. For some reason, this was not available when I signed up.
My first iteration was to log in to my nominal Blogger blog as the login can then be used to comment on other Blogger blogs and my name duly appears as silvertiger (yes, in semi-literate lower case letters).
I had thought up a number of complicated solutions until I discovered Typekey and I now use my Typekey ID to comment on Blogger.
The question I have about OpenID is “how universal is it really?” There are many agencies offering OpenIDs but you have to sign on with each separately and none seems to know of the logon you have created elsewhere. That doesn’t seem very “open” to me. There is nothing to stop different people acquiring the same name by logging on to different OpenID providers. There is therefore no guarantee that the “silvertiger” who comments on your blog is the “silvertiger” of the WordPress blog of that name.
Hi SilverTiger
There does seem to be a lack of commonality in how OpenID is implemented. Currently commenting on Blogger and using WordPress as an authenticator I get to chose any ID name I want (different to my blog name) but that option may not be implemented elsewhere. Not sure if that’s an OpenID fault or a lack of agreement on how each blog or website implements the protocol.Often companies fight against ‘open standards’ which end up being bastardised in their implementation in order to favour their own offerings.I know the perceived advantage of OpenID is that the server is decentralised (and distributed) which is a better bet for privacy and security. Any single sign-on service is doing so to cut down on spam but that means having blacklists for each service if a single standard is not agreed. Blogger and Google ID’s are not currently linked to OpenID authentication or similar and so cannot be used to leave comments on other OpenID compatible blogs and websites.