The news regarding Verisign acquiring weblogs.com is true, and they are already at work on handling the issue of combating splogs, or spam blogs:

We’ve just begun doing some analysis on just how many blogs out there are real– the work of real humans crafting posts – rather than simply splogs – web pages that are generated automatically by scripts and programs to look just like (or much like) real blogs, but serve only as a place to park keywords that will hopefully be found in a search, and advertisements that hopefully will be clicked on by humans who happen to somehow land on that page. In talking to Google, they can confirm what our initial scan tells us: there are an enormous number of splogs out there, and the number is growing faster than the number of real blogs. By a good margin.

Dave Winer explains why he had to sell his service: scalability reasons:

Their name servers, I hear, respond to 250,000 requests per second at peak loads. In comparison, weblogs.com’s 1-2 million pings a day seems a drop in the bucket. Further, it will require great resources to tackle the ping-spam issue, and there Verisign’s expertise, not just what’s visible today, but what’s coming down the road, will make all the difference. I was in no posiiton to do this on my own. And belive me, the Technorait’s and PubSub’s, even Feedster and Bloglines, weren’t helping out very much. I belive they’ll respect Verisign much more than they respected me.

Winer has been critical of big companies in the past which his detractors I’m sure will point to this sale as a sign of hypocrisy but those of us who legitimately use the weblogs ping service will benefit. I don’t think Dave selling weblogs is a bad thing. It seems like pinging audio.weblogs.com had become a dicey proposition and load issues had crippled Scoble’s blog comments on more than one occasion. This was definitely a situation that needed work and rather than keep running it as a one lung operation by a single developer, Dave is passing the baton. There comes a time when that is necessary and kudos to Dave for all he has done to create the system and build it to this point.

Speaking of Scoble and Doc Searl’s blogs. They were not part of the Verisign deal. In Scoble’s case it doesn’t really matter as he was planning on jumping over to scoblelizer.wordpress.com anyway. Why he is not going to run his own domain vs. another third party hosted domain remains a mystery, apparently even to Scoble who said recently in his own comments area:

I wouldn’t recommend moving URLs. I’m trying to figure that one out.

As for Verisign commercializing weblogs.com? They’re promising that the “basic pings” will remain free to submit and free to retrieve from the service. I’m a little bit apprehensive here, although it would be difficult for them to pull this rug out — yeah, I bet readers expected me to be. Lest we forget this is the same Verisign who tried to revert mistyped domains to their own page and had to have ICANN get tough with them.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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