Matt Mullenweg on VeriSign’s move into the blog space

Matt Mullenweg recently posted his views on VeriSign moving into the blog space with its acquisition of Weblogs.com. Matt is a lead developer of WordPress, an open source blogging tool, and one of the developers of Ping-o-Matic, a ping relay service that currently forwards a blog update ping to over 20 destinations. Matt has some first-hand experience with the team at VeriSign.

We should have been better prepared for this. Earlier in the year Verisign had the Boston Consulting Group calling people in the space trying to pick their brains, while at the same time refusing to reveal who they were working for. (Shady.) The “real time web” group also took me to dinner at one point and outlined their view for a “value-added” ping ecosystem (with Verisign in the middle, of course). Every major content producer and every company relying on the ping stream should be very worried about this move.

I think the blogosphere is currently waiting for VeriSign to unveil more of its intentions for these services but so far they seem to be off to a shaky start.

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