OpenID is not a trust system. But... Google kinda is.

[Brad Fitzpatrick]

OpenID consumers validate somebody owns a URL, right?

But how can LiveJournal trust that person isn't a spammer who set up his
own identity server just for spamming?  OpenID doesn't attempt to solve
this.

We keep talking about a hypothetical trust system build atop OpenID, FOAF,
XFN, etc.  I'm sure somebody will build it.

But in the meantime, it already exists, and its name is Google PageRank.

And it's probably against the Google Toolbar TOS, but the Firefox Google
Toolbar gets the pagerank like this:

// *******************************************************************
var url = window._content.document.location;
var reqgr = "info:" + url;
var reqgre = "info:" + URLencode(url);
var ch = "6" + GoogleCH(strord(reqgr));
var querystring =
"http://toolbarqueries.google.com/search?client=navclient-auto&ch=" + ch +
    "&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&features=Rank&q=" + reqgre;
gXMLHttpRequest = new XMLHttpRequest();
gXMLHttpRequest.onload = SetPagerank;
gXMLHttpRequest.open("GET", querystring);
gXMLHttpRequest.setRequestHeader("User-Agent","Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;
GoogleToolbar 2.0.111-big; Windows XP
5.1)");
gXMLHttpRequest.send(null);
// *******************************************************************


So it's possible, and easy.  We just need Google to bless it and say
bloggers can use it for anti-comment-spam measures.

Any Googlers want to pass this request along?

- Brad