One of the best things about having universal identifiers for people is that you can pass those identifiers around as a way to federate a loose kind of "trust". Simon Willison wrote about this before.

The Trust Me plugin is the implementation of this idea.

Quite literally you enter in people's OpenID's that you trust. Two things happen: those OpenIDs gain Tier 1 trust -- and you can give them pre-defined roles on your WordPress blog (like admin, author, contributor, editor, etc). This is how you integrate WordPress' user account roles with Trust Me.

The second aspect is that at the remote OpenID, you look for XFN connections. Where you find rel-friend and so on, you can ascribe a trust level to those friendships, and when the people who own those URLs show up and login to your blog, you can whitelist their comments since their declared friends of your Tier 1 trust friends.

Through a system like this, people could pass around "passlists" of OpenIDs that can be trusted to leave quality comments.

Similarly, if a comment has been moderated and it ends up being approved, the poster's URL could be added to a list of rel-approved links, without proscribing a level of trust, but simply indicating that yes, this link was actively reviewed and approved.

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