Updated at 11:50 p.m. eastern to include interview with Dave Winer: VeriSign moved quickly tonight to shift the Weblogs.com story from reports of a sale to what the company will do with its new acquisition from Dave Winer. Michael Graves, the techno-evangelist for the Real Time Web team at VeriSign, appropriately blogged the confirmation, the reasons for the purchase and plans for the site.
Last Thursday, the site processed 1.96 million pings in one day, nearly twice the amount when the two started talking during the summer. With the toll only increasing, the options for Dave as Graves lays them out were to invest significant capital in more robust infrastructure, sell to someone who would do that or death by overuse.
VeriSign already runs the DSL Registry and other services with immense amounts of traffic, which should be good prep for what the company sees as a no-too-distant future where that ping number from last week could be for an hour, not a day, propelled by the spread of RSS as a distribution method beyond blogs.
So what’s the business model for what until now has been a free service? Basic pings will remain free to submit and to retrieve; in fact, current users shouldn’t see anychange. Eventually, VeriSign will add premium services. The company promises to keep Dave’s open model format alive. Graves: “We want to excel in our execution and implementation of our services, rather than building a walled garden around a proprietary platform.”
They hope to make the site “a useful destination for checking in on the infrastructure side of the blogosphere” and a hub for aggregated metrics. Verisign plans to tackle the growing problem of blog spam and is already trying to separate the real blogs from the splogs. Graves says Technorati’s 18 million-plus blog number is true “but only if we’re fairly charitable in what we’d call a blog.” He suggests filtering. “Does that mean censorship? No. As above, we’re committed to maintaining the integrity of the free and open ping stream, in all its wild and chaotic glory.” But one of the first apps could be a blog filtering service. Graves says the company already is working with others on the splog issue.
Dave Winer: Just got off the phone with Dave, who tells me the sale price was $2.3 million and Michael Arrington of TechCrunch was one of his lawyers; Keith Teare was an early intermediary. (Arrington and Teare, who also edits TechCrunch, are business partners.) “I think I had to sell it. I don’t think I had a choice,” he explained. “I don’t need to be the operational center.” Part of the sale value will be the relief of no longer being responsible for the service although he’ll continue to work with VeriSign. You can read his first-person account here. By the way, one deal point covers subdomains radio.weblogs.com, doc.weblogs.com and scoble.weblogs.com, which will continue to be mapped by VeriSign to their current servers. But VeriSign did acquire audio.weblogs.com, so they will be “part of the infrastructure of the podcasting community.”
The site grew out of organic needs, not a business plan, when he no longer could keep track of the changes on sites. When crawling registered sites no longer worked, pinging was born — and with it a chunk of the infrastructure the businesses that followed have relied on for Web 2.0 sharing.
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