First Google bought Blogger, then Yahoo bought Blo.gs, then AOL bought Weblogs Inc. and now Verisign has purchased the Weblogs.com pinging system for $2.3 million. England’s favorite tech paper the Inquirer reports :
A main piece of the blogging infrastructure – ping service Weblogs.com – has been bought by the Net’s largest company, VeriSign, for $2.3m. The deal will see VeriSign continue to run the basic ping service for free but add charged-for services, including a blog filter, in coming months.
So why the hell did David Winer sell one of the major blog pinging services on the Net and one fine ass domain name to Verisign for $2.3 million? I mean, that’s a lot of dough, but wouldn’t there be more opps for Weblogs.com to get into? Like search or aggregating or whatever?
Dave explains on his blog:
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. 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.
The bootstrap of weblogs.com is something a bigco should not attempt, it’s hard to make it go, and most bootstraps don’t, and it requires trust, something an individual is more likely able to inspire than a big company. On the other hand, running a serivce that other bigco’s depend on (like Google, and Microsoft, to name two) is not something a person like myself should attempt. I think Verisign is the perfect company to do it.
Well, good for Weblogs.com, David, and Verisign. Congrats on the sale Mr. Winer.
