p2p news / p2pnet:- VeriSign, in the process of selling its payment processing business to eBay for $370 million, has bought Weblogs.com, the primary blog "ping" service for tracking updates.

This, “capped a wild Thursday in the blogosphere, which started with the announcement that America Online has bought Weblogs Inc, one of the most prominent blogging networks,” says Netcraft, going on:

“While the AOL-Weblogs Inc. deal is focused on content, VeriSign’s purchase of Weblogs.com from founder Dave Winer is all about infrastructure and, “pings are well on their way to requiring serious infrastructure.”

But there’s more to this than merely beefing up the Weblogs.com ping service, according to Netcraft.

“VeriSign is developing RSS security products for the corporate market, and Weblogs.com can be an asset in that effort,” it says, quoting VeriSign’s Mike Graves as sayihng:

"There’s a wide variety of services that we’re looking at and working on right now, but will focus on one that we’re committed to in the near term and believe is a compelling problem for the blogosphere in general: blog spam. As a first ‘killer app’ to deploy on top of weblogs.com ping services, we’d like to make progress in improving the ’signal-to-noise ratio’ in the blogosphere."

VeriSign says Weblogs.com will remain open but, states Graves, “Over time, we plan to offer value-added services to publishers and consumers that we can charge a fee for, in much the same way companies like Yahoo! provide basic email services for free, and offer premium ‘upgrades’ for a fee (e.g. extra storage, domain hosting, integrated website, etc)," says Netcraft, adding:

“In an update on his Scripting News blog, Winer acknowledged that many bloggers may have concerns about VeriSign. "No doubt we’ll have an interesting discussion about this in the blogosphere, and I hope a productive one, and that we’ll all find a way to work with Verisign," wrote Winer. "I think there’s reason to believe they can and will do a much better job of running the ping center than I have been able to, and this is the perfect example of individual innovators (myself in this case) working with large companies in ways that leverage the strength of both."

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See:-
payment processing - eBay buys VeriSign unit, October 11, 2005
Netcraft - VeriSign Acquires Weblogs.com, Declares War on ‘Splogs’, October 7, 2005

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