Updated at 9:05 p.m. eastern: VeriSign has officially confirmed this, on its company blog, here..more later…
Jason Kottke is reporting with a healthy amount of skepticism that Dave Winer has sold Weblogs.com, the largest and oldest ping service, to Verisign. I’ve confirmed it with someone familiar with the situation. Kottke heard $5 million; I can’t confirm that but I believe it’s a healthy check. As any reader of Scripting News knows, Dave is on a flight east this afternoon en route to Converge South and I’ll try to catch up him when he lands. There’s always the chance all the sources are off kilter but this feels real.
More to come.
Michael Arrington profiles Weblogs.com and does a good job of explaining the value of a ping server. Essentially, a robust ping server is the axis upon which the shared web (or as Michael calls it, the real-time web) rotates. Instead of indexing to find changes, the changes are announced via the ping server. Weblogs.com, which started as an index server in 1999 and later became a ping server, shows changes for the past three hours.
Dave’s history of Weblogs.com is the birth of the blogosphere. For a number of years, Weblogs.com also was a free blog host. Dave raised a ruckus when he decided to switch off the blog hosting. (That link goes to a story I write for Wired News at the time and has some background.) Bloggers Doc Searls and Robert Scoble still have blogs housed at weblogs.com although Scoble is in the midst of moving as part of a blog software change. Scoble isn’t confirming or denying the sale.
Update: I caught Dave as he was changing planes. He was just hearing that the story was out and said he couldn’t comment at this point. Hope to talk to him later. I wish this weren’t popping while he’s offline; being blindsided isn’t fun for anyone, even if a big check is part of the deal. Meanwhile, the SiliconBeat team says they’ve confirmed the deal is done and the price tag was $2 million.
Related: Yahoo’s Shopping Spree Includes Ping Service Blo.gs
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