In the second Weblog sale this week, Dave Winer’s weblogs.com has been bought by Verisign. The ping server needs investment to cope with the exponential increase in blogs, plus the investigation and work on how to clean up pings from spam blogs. Verisign have put forward their vision for the continuation of the service:
- Free‘Basic pings, the messages processed by weblogs.com, will remain free to submit, and free to retrieve from the service’. Although they will look at adding value-added services for fees.
- Open‘In all cases, we endorse open formats, freely available, freely implementable by the rest of the community.’ ‘We want to excel in our execution and implementation of our services, rather than building a walled garden around a proprietary platform.’
- Solid‘We have the skills, resources and experience in highly-scaled, high-performance infrastructure to deploy ping server services that will serve the blogosphere (and beyond) for the next stages of growth’
- Informative‘we would like to make weblogs.com – the website – a useful destination for checking in on the infrastructure side of the blogosphere. We anticipate it being a handy place to check in for aggregated metrics’
So a vision of maintinaing an open, community service whislt strengthening the infrastrcutre and scaleability of the service to cope with increasing demands., Sounds good to me. Winer wrote about the day of the announcement, which appeared to be slightly ahead of schedule
