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October 6, 2005

Verisign Acquires Weblogs.com

Michael Arrington

17 comments »

Verisign has confirmed their acquisition of the Weblogs.com ping server network and related assets. See the Verisign blog post here as well.

We aren’t going to write a lot about it here on TechCrunch because Keith Teare and I were advisors to Weblogs.com on the deal. I will say that I believe this is a game-changing event for the blogosphere.

Dave Winer, the founder of Weblogs.com and the inventor of blog ping servers tells the story here (and kindly mentions our involvement).

If you’d like to understand more about ping servers, I wrote a profile of Weblogs.com in July of this year.

For more coverage, you should also read Jason Kottke, Staci Kramer, Robert Scoble and Michael Bazeley.

Congratulations, Dave. You deserve this, my friend.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 6th, 2005 at 11:45 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. macewan

    October 7th, 2005 at 9:00 am

    hat tip to Dave

  2. Anjo

    October 7th, 2005 at 1:18 pm

    I’m confused, what is the point/value of weblogs.com? It seems to be 90% spam, all those ‘Free info’ entrys. Do people really go there to see the latest updated weblogs where there are such a broad range of sites, it might make more sense if it was divided by language and categorys/tags.

    Congratulations on the sale though.

  3. Michael Arrington

    October 7th, 2005 at 3:01 pm

    Anjo,

    Ping servers are critical for the proper working of blogs. They are the way that real time search engines like technorati, pubsub, icerocket, etc. know a blog has updated. Without ping servers, the search engines would have to index every blog every few minutes to keep content updated. With ping servers, the blog tells the search engines that it has updated, and the search engines can therefore only re index updated blogs.

  4. Randy Charles Morin

    October 7th, 2005 at 3:54 pm

    Technorati, PubSub and IceRocket take pings directly and don’t require Weblogs.com to know when a blog has been updated. Of course, not everyone pings every ping sink, so they enhance their data with that available at Weblogs.com. But, it’s not required. Anymore.

  5. Michael Arrington

    October 7th, 2005 at 5:12 pm

    Randy, yeah, there are many ping servers today, but weblogs is the oldest and is built into everything. For instance, I only ping weblogs.com because I know that’s enough to get the word out to all ping servers.

  6. Randy Charles Morin

    October 7th, 2005 at 10:45 pm

    Michael, you can setup a FeedBurner account for your feed and ping everybody else. You don’t even have to advertise your FeedBurner feed URL. Cost? $0.

  7. Michael Arrington

    October 7th, 2005 at 11:44 pm

    Yes, that’s true, Feedburner now has a ping server. And in fact I use FB and love it dearly.

    Still, Dave Winer invented ping servers and paved the way for real time web servers. Weblogs is still the most used and most complete ping server. Verisign recognized that and bought the company. They have big plans for it. I’m happy for Dave and I think VRSN is doing the right thing for their business.

  8. nicky

    October 10th, 2005 at 8:06 pm

    Honored,sir:excuese my poor English,I’m from China ,worked in an IT company.Know you through the google,I’ve registed your blog’RSS,I think you are deeping and interesting.Now ,my company is interested in facebook.com,I have to get a facebook account to login the web ,then I can learn the web.But I’m not a American student,so can you help me? my EMAIL:nickyhu949404@hotmail.com

  9. luis cole

    November 15th, 2005 at 1:50 pm

    cool stuff. keep up the good work. life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions: http://psa-eid.org , Green is feature of Superb Cards maintaining the linux , when Girl is Chair it will Roll TV in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes

  10. adithya

    January 4th, 2006 at 10:40 pm

    hi,
    is sending a simple XML-RPC message
    (as described at http://www.xmlrpc.com/weblogsCom )
    the standard way to work with all ping servers?

  11. Ray

    October 9th, 2006 at 8:37 pm

    well
    http://domains.optionextreme.com/

  12. Ray2

    October 9th, 2006 at 8:39 pm

    http://domains.optionextreme.net/

  13. poesia

    February 22nd, 2007 at 7:19 am

    Grande sito!!

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