VeriSign acquires Weblogs.com

VeriSign Inc. announced Friday it has acquired Weblogs.com. Mountain View, California based VeriSign bought Berkeley based Weblogs.com from Scripting News Inc. for $2.3 million in cash.

Weblogs.com offers a ping service that uses RSS to alert people to new content posted on a blog or website.

Weblogs.com founder Dave Winer told the Associated Press that Weblogs.com had grown to be too big for him to handle. "Actually, I would have liked to sell sooner. Keeping the site running was a perpetual challenge. We would scale and it would just grow exponentially." said Winer. Weblogs.com sends out nearly 2 million pings per day.

“VeriSign has the size and expertise to handle the growth” said Mark McLaughlin, senior VP of naming and directory services at VeriSign. "The Internet has experienced an explosion in both the number of bloggers and the number of daily RSS feeds from bloggers over the past 12 to 24 months, but the infrastructure to support that level of Internet communications has not kept pace," said McLaughlin.

VeriSign has said they will continue to operate Weblogs.com as a free service. However they may in the future charge for additional services.

America Online also recently acquired a similarly named but unrelated blog publisher, Weblogs Inc.