A good consumer allows you to link more than one OpenID to the same account. Once you’ve linked an OpenID once you should be able to adjust your ratings for it’s provider on a “rate my providers” page regardless of which ID you used to sign into the site with.

“If we really managed to get new users (i.e. not those who regularly blog about it, work in that industry,…) to participate in a voting, I guess most of them used a popular service like AOL or WordPress as a provider”

I think that’s true, in that it would be a major source of adoption. However, most users are already used to having accounts at the all the leading online players.

If they found value in OpenID I think it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect them to ’shop around’ particularly amongst companies that they already had accounts with. In such a case have a comparison between those companies would be very useful. We should be trying to push those companies to compete to be the best provider.

Sam, I don’t think we’ll have a provider rating here, though. If we really managed to get new users (i.e. not those who regularly blog about it, work in that industry,…) to participate in a voting, I guess most of them used a popular service like AOL or WordPress as a provider. On the other hand there are people like me who use different providers because I think there are some which have equally great features. I had to log in at least three times to make sure all of them got their well deserved rating.

Also OpenID Directory (which is also run by Thomas) has a voting system already, though not exclusively for providers.

I’d also like to see some analysis of the ease of use to manage multiple profiles, etc. I think simplifying the concepts is essential for mass adoption. Have a provider with lots of options isn’t useful if it’s near impossible for regular folks to use them.