VeriSign snags Weblogs.com

VeriSign has acquired Weblogs.com and its "ping" service in a $2.3 million cash deal.

With the acquisition from Scripting News, VeriSign said Friday that it is seeking a slice of the rapidly growing blogging community. VeriSign, which operates the Internet registry for .com and .net domains, is the latest large industry player to announce a blog-related acquisition.

The acquisition is unrelated to America Online's announcement Thursday that it plans to acquire blog publisher Weblogs Inc.

Weblogs.com's ping service alerts people when new content posts to a Web site or blog. Weblogs.com, for example, currently lists nearly 6,000 updates from the past five minutes.

VeriSign, which plans to continue operating Weblogs.com as an open service, noted it currently handles almost 2 million daily pings and supports thousands of RSS feeds.

"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," Mark McLaughlin, VeriSign's senior vice president of naming and directory services, said in a statement.

VeriSign, which also develops technologies for securing voice and data transmissions on networks, plans to migrate the ping service to its infrastructure, with the intent of offering a service that can handle the load as RSS and real-time content demands grow.