The response to VeriSign’s acquisition of Weblogs.com for $2.3 million depends on the perspective. Generally pleased but wary: people who a) like and/or respect Dave Winer; b) like to see work pay off; c) understand the infrastructure challenges; d) are ok with the concept but worried about the execution; e) any or all of the above. Not happy: people who put VeriSign in the evil category and think it shouldn’t be allowed to play a greater role than it already does as the manager of .com and .org or people who don’t like commercialism if it involves big companies. (Never mind that big companies have been using the service to make money.) Then there are people who just like to see a numeric value attached to a web service.
My guess: VeriSign could earn back a fair amount of trust by helping resolve the splog ‘splosion and living up to its promises of free basic ping service and openness.
Jason Kottke (who broke the story): “Dave seems to trust Verisign to do the job; I think Verisign has shown itself to be an untrustworthy, terrible company.”
Roland Tangelo: “Like Kottke, I don’t trust Verisign. However, I trust that Dave will keep them in line. Bottom line: go Dave go!”
Barb Dybwad: “They appear to have seen the future of the web, and that future is pings. As such, they’ll be throwing resources and infrastructure at weblogs.com, already straining under the weight of its ever-growing daily pingage. … Additional plans sound like they’re going to involve tackling the spam blog problem. Vaya con dios with that, VeriSign.”
Jon Udell: “… now that an 800-pound gorilla has arrived on the scene, I’d like to know whether its vision extends beyond weblogs.com to an open federation of notification services.” (Also, a very good look at some of the issues surrounding pinging.)
Kevin Werbach: “I don’t know entirely what Verisign intends to do with Weblogs.com. Probably Verisign itself isn’t certain. What’s clear is that Verisign correctly sees the blogsophere as a major emerging domain of online activity, superimposed on the traditional Web.”
Much more via TechMemeorandum.)
Subscriber content
?
Subscriber content comes from Gigaom Research, bridging the gap between breaking news and long-tail research. Visit any of our reports to learn more and subscribe.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Comments have been disabled for this post