Michael Graves of VeriSign announced the acquisition of Weblogs.com this evening. SiliconBeat reports Dave Winer sold the service for $2 million. VeriSign plans to maintain the ping beacon in its current form with additional revenue models and ping extensions beyond the current implementation.
VeriSign hints at upsell opportunities for ping submission and retrieval and views the weblogs.com ping beacon as a "competing service." They plan to overhaul the Weblogs.com infrastructure to achieve higher levels of performance and stability. VeriSign also mentions a future statistics service available at Weblogs.com that will display statistics such as total pings received, processed feeds, and language information.
I expect VeriSign will introduce an authentication certificate for ping submissions to its servers. One possible upsell on the listening side is the ability to be alerted to a blog update before anyone else, similar to how stock market systems delay stock quotes to non-premium customers. VeriSign could also sell more personal authentication keys to bloggers using stand-alone services such as Movable Type or WordPress to allow for the rebroadcast of a ping submission.
Movable Type users who no longer wish to send a ping to weblogs.com can replace weblogs.com in all of their installed blogs by customizing Movable Type default ping options for the WeblogsPingURL directive.
Tags: verisign
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