VeriSign Gets In The Middle Of Blogging Too
from the dave-winer,-meet-crazy-frog dept
Apparently it's a good day to have "weblogs" in the name of your company. Following the buyout of Weblogs Inc. today comes the news from Silicon Beat that VeriSign is buying Dave Winer's Weblogs.com for a hefty $2 million. This is likely to cause some confusion concerning what VeriSign wants with the site (it's not a company, just a service, basically), but it actually does seem to fit with their overall strategy of being in the "middle" of everything. VeriSign is sort of the antithesis of companies betting on decentralization, preferring to look for ways to manage large or complex systems in the middle. With the growth of "pinging" RSS (and other) feeds, this puts VeriSign right in the middle again. The trick will be how they plan to add value from that central position. The early talk is about adding security features to blogs, but it could go much further. Perhaps the pendulum is swinging back towards centralized services rather than decentralized.
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