One of the more resilient residents of the search engine industry, Ask Jeeves, completed its acquisition of Bloglines, confirming the chatter circulating in the blogosphere and press.
Ask Jeeves Completes Bloglines Acquisition
What caused more reaction: The news of the Ask/Bloglines merger, or the breaking of the news itself? What was worthy of more reaction? Discuss at WebProWorld.
Bloglines offers a comprehensive, integrated service for searching, subscribing, publishing and sharing news feeds, and blogs. Currently, Ask Jeeves has no plans to scrap the Bloglines service or brand. Bloglines will continue to operate independently, while retaining its name and URL.
Senior Vice President of Search Properties at Ask Jeeves (and confessed Bloglines addict) Jim Lazone said of the merger,
“First and most importantly, our primary focus will be on building the Bloglines service to fulfill his vision for it, adding resources to their toolbox to get there faster and better.
There will be no short-term changes to Bloglines that weren’t already on their roadmap. Over the long-term, Mark will now, as general manager of Bloglines for AJ, Inc., be responsible for that roadmap in the future.
We will take our time determining the optimal business model for the service. We will continue to put the user experience first. As part of a bigger company there will be more options for Bloglines – from indirect monetization (through increased usage of our other brands) to direct if there is a model that makes sense for everyone.”
With the explosion of blogs, once embargoed news is out it tends to spread like wildfire. However, the fact that people were reporting on an embargoed story didn’t escape notice.
Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch wrote an article discussing the role blogs had in breaking this story. He makes a distinction between media embargoes and breaking news:
A blogger who learns something, or a forum member who posts — or even a journalist that can confirm a rumor through other channels — none of them are breaking an embargo if they haven’t agreed to anything. They’re just breaking news.
Indeed, Mary Hodder who broke the news (not the embargo) of the Bloglines purchase notes that she hadn’t agreed to any embargo on the news. Indeed, if you go back to her original post, she didn’t provide any official source of confirmation from either Ask Jeeves or Bloglines.
Reaction to the news leak sparked some controversy. However, most of the news about the actual merger was positive. In his blog, John Battelle looked at the business potential of the Ask/Bloglines service
Bloglines is growing like a weed, has tons of users, and more interestingly, tons of data about what those users read. Those profiles might make for some serious endemic advertising plays down the road. Both Fletcher and Lanzone concur. “The profile a user makes on Bloglines is a pretty good proxy for a user’s interest,” Lanzone said. “But step one is to let Mark blow it out, and see where it goes.”
So don’t expect any AdWords or other monetization, at least at first, and not in your face. Lanzone took pains to make sure I understood that *he* understood he has a good thing, and doesn’t want to [mess] it up.
The Mercury News Silicon Beat blog featured audio tracks of an interview with Jim Lazone and Bloglines founder Mark Fletcher. The interview also gave some insight into the goal for the merger:
“Our goal here is to invest in Bloglines, not subsume it into Ask Jeeves and have it go away and never be seen again. Not to slap our logo everywhere and certainly not start slapping ads on it and to kill it with monetization.”
Down the road, Lanzone said, Ask Jeeves will look at opportunities to merge the Bloglines service into Ask Jeeves’ offerings. He mentioned desktop searching and MyJeeves, a service that allows people to store bookmarks and search results, as “obvious starters.”
Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for murdok. Visit murdok for the latest search news.
