The Weblogs.com site shows a list of currently updated blogs, and allows blog owners to ping others to alert them of new updates.
VeriSign will make the Weblogs service a more reliable and scalable one, as it moves the service onto its massive array of servers. Scripting News Inc, the owner of Weblogs, and VeriSign announced the deal on Friday.
The new owners will still run Weblogs as an openly available service, they said in a statement today. Weblogs handles nearly two million pings on a daily basis, and that number is expected to grow as more blogs arrive online.
VeriSign talked more about the reasons for the deal in the statement:
“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 Mark McLaughlin, senior vice president of VeriSign’s Naming and Directory Services.
“VeriSign is uniquely positioned to provide the scalable, secure infrastructure that the blogosphere needs. Purchasing the ping server architecture of Weblogs.com enables VeriSign to continue supporting the vast numbers of Internet communications and improve the experience of millions of Internet users.”
One improvement VeriSign wants to implement will be the ability to filter spam blogs out of Weblogs. Sensitive to potential complaints of censorship, VeriSign will develop filters, but won’t unilaterally impose them on Weblogs. Instead, users will be able to choose whether they wish to see Weblogs with filters in place or not.
By describing their efforts to improve the signal to noise ratio by filtering based on content analysis meeting certain thresholds, it appears VeriSign will use Bayesian filters or something similar. That approach is used in products like SpamBayes and works well at culling email spam from incoming messages.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
