I've been involved into the identity management a while ago and heard OpenID as a "a free and easy way to use a single digital identity across the Internet." 
Basically it's a free, open and distributed framework for user authentication. There is extension to add more value into this framework such as creating user profile automatically by having additional user information.
What you can do with OpenID
- Use OpenID as a user
- Make your site OpenID enabled
- SSO(single sign on) integrated with OpenID
- OpenID and SSO implementation with PHP/JAVA etc
- Build up IDP(identity provider)
I've tried some OpenID and some implementations and constantly amazed by the great community based effort. When combined with other technology like strong authentication such as phonefactor, it becomes more efforless,easier and quicker to build up community with higher security requirement.
Convergence of Access and Information Policies
From RSA blog Convergence of Access and Information Policies
most of the discussions were around operating within a heterogeneous environment with various standards and versions thereof (SAML, WSFED, OpenID, etc.) for asserting federated identity. At the Burton Catalyst Conference, federation was certainly one of the hot topics and there were many discussions about dealing with the complexity raised at the Concordia Workshop. Covisint, a great customer and partner of RSA, was a hit at the show and has made a great business out of managing this complexity.
Top Five Intriguing Ideas for Authentication in 2008
From RSA blog Top Five Intriguing Ideas for Authentication in 2008
There are a plethora of identity standards, frameworks and other initiatives including OpenID, CardSpace, Higgins and others. These have largely been relevant to low dollar transactions and activities for consumers. There is starting to be a bleed into the enterprise because consumers also work for companies. Organizations are being faced with heterogeneity when dealing with federation anyway, so adopting identity standards is just another way to exchange information. Vendors like Microsoft are starting to enable applications like SharePoint. There will be funded projects in 2008 in which marrying various forms of authentication to identity will start to make economic sense to security vendors rather than just be of a technical interest.
Blinksale supports OpenId
My own OpenID provider
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