VeriSign Buys Weblogs.com for $2.3 Million. Weblogs.com -- which is
essentially a "weblog update pinging services" -- has been purchased
by VeriSign, Inc., for $2.3 Million
from Scripting News, Inc (ie, Dave Winer).
In my opinion, this is mostly -- well, at least half -- about the
domain name. That's a very, very good domain name, obviously.
The service it runs is important, that's true. There are lots of secondary
services that check the very long list of recently updated weblogs on an
hourly or daily basis. As the number of weblogs has grown over the years,
the load on that server has grown by several orders of magnitude, to the
point that it's almost unusable by people sitting in front of their
browsers: the only 'clients' patient enough to use it are the services that
ping it and the automated scripts that check it.
So, Verisign paid a couple million dollars for one of the most valuable
domain names imaginable. The domain name comes with a service they'll have
to run themselves which can't generate any cash on its own. They claim that
they're going to maintain the service as "open and free," which is actually
the only way it could be done (*nobody* would pay to ping). With a
relatively small investment (less than $100K), they could/should/will set
up a new ping server that can handle the load and not require constant
babying.
My Prediction
Unfortunately, knowing Verisign -- part of one of the most hated companies
on the internet -- they will screw this up completely. Perhaps they'll
require free registration before your weblog can submit pings, or they'll
change the ping API. Maybe they'll come up with some even more clever way
to totally annoy the weblog-publishing masses. People will react in horror
that they've broken something so important, but eventually Verisign will
reveal just how they plan to make money with this domain name and
eventually people will shut up.
Congrats
Congratulations to Dave, though!
Now he has enough money (again) to do whatever it is he's planning with
his outliner, or to go back to driving around the country, or to start
pushing the next XML dialect that everybody will use and most of the
digerati will hate. :-) Maybe he has something else up his sleeve! As
he's made clear over the years (today being a good example), the man
can talk an awful lot without ever telling us what's really going on in
his head. By Seth Dillingham. [Truer Words - A Journal]
I'm also rather curious what will happen to the radio.weblogs.com subdomain.
2:05:55 PM 
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