Dave Winer sells Weblogs.com to Verisign

Nice1 : His full post to come. Latest from his scripting.com blog. The PaidContent update :

"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. "I think I had to sell it. I don't think I had a choice," he explained. "I dont need to be the operational center."

"Mike Graves: "Word is out, and it’s true: VeriSign has acquired the assets of Dave Winer’s weblogs.com." The three sub-domains of weblogs.com that are run by other people are not part of the deal: 1. scoble.weblogs.com, 2. doc.weblogs.com and 3. radio.weblogs.com. VeriSign will continue to map them to the places the currenty point. None of these sites are actually on my servers (they were at one time). In other words, no changes. audio.weblogs.com is part of the deal. So VeriSign becomes part of the infrastructure of the podcasting community. I wrote notes on the philosophy of the deal and the events of the day from my point of view. I'll be posting them shortly. " From Verisign related blog :

"Word is out, and it’s true: VeriSign has acquired the assets of Dave Winer’s weblogs.com. I’m sure Dave will have plenty to say on the subject, but weblogs.com this past year has reached a point where Dave needed to either a) invest significant capital into the development of Weblogs 2.0 – a ping server to handle the next several years of traffic growth, b) sell it to someone else who would do the same, or c) watch as the current system slowly (or maybe quickly) succumbed to the ever-growing stream of pings. Last Thursday weblogs.com processed just under 2 million (1.96M) pings for the day. When we started talking with Dave, a couple months back, the ping totals were barely half of that, and the load even then on the servers made pinging weblogs a chancy proposition during peak posting times (late morning and mid-evening in the US). For a long time, ping servers could be stood up as a single box running on a fast business DSL connection. Those days have passsed at least for the popular ping servers; pings are well on their way to requiring serious infrastructure.

Why VeriSign?

That’s where VeriSign comes in. Not only are we running the DNS Registry and the largest TLDs (.com/.net), we handle hundreds of millions of transactions every month in the areas of mobile telephony, ecommerce payments, and instant messaging among other things. As we look ahead a few years, we see a future in which pings are generated not just by the millions per day, but by the tens and hundreds of millions. The blogosphere will continue to grow – rapidly – but we already note signs that RSS and the mechanics of feed-based publishing will extend well beyond the blogging perimeter, and be adopted as an enabling technology in areas like mainstream media publishing and corporate data distribution. In short, we believe that it won’t be long before terms like ping, feed, and trackback become part of the conventional lexicon for Internet publishing as a whole, not just the realm of blogs."