AOL is betting on user-generated content to help it move away from the ISP business and grow its bottom line, while Verisign is investing in the architecture of the "live Web."The blogosphere was abuzz with surprise and cautious optimism Thursday with the news that a major blog network and a blog update notification service were being acquired by large media companies. America Online Inc. announced its acquisition of Weblogs Inc., and Verisign Inc. announced their acquisition of Weblogs.com.
America Online's purchase was valued at approximately $25 million, and is expected to close next week. There were no immediate figures available for the Verisign purchase, although observers speculate the deal to be worth approximately $2 million.
Verisign confirmed the rumors of its purchase on its company blog.
"We want to see weblogs.com remain what it is, and maintain how it works for the long term," read the Verisign blog entry. "There's enormous value for the ecosystem in realizing Dave's original vision for his ping server: a free, standards-based service that is easy to use, and effective in signaling to the world at large that you've submitted new content into the system."
Dave Winer, founder of Weblogs.com, refused to comment.
The AOL deal is the first large-scale blog network acquisition since Google acquired Blogger in 2003. Blogging has only grown in popularity since then. According to a Pew Internet research study, there are over 12,000 blogs published every day. Technorati.com, the original blog search service, now tracks over 18.9 million sites. Both Google and Yahoo! have announced blog search tools.
The Verisign acquisition signals the importance of RSS and ping servers to the "live Web." Verisign is betting that ping servers, which notify readers when a site updates, will continue to be an important component of feed-based publishing.
The acquisitions may mark a tipping point in how large media companies value user-generated content.
"There's a wide variety of things that we can do," said AOL Chairman and CEO Jonathan Miller of the Weblogs Inc. acquisition. "User-generated content, it's a big playing field. It's publishing, it's micropublishing, it's blogs…Our vision in that regard is how do we make all these things relate to each other and coexist."
Miller added that he hoped the weblog business would expand in the future, and said that AOL will increasingly create homes for user-generated content.
"The weblogs acquisition is part of that as well," Miller said. "We can take it to print, we can take it to video." He added later: "This is just part of the puzzle."
The AOL and Verisign acquisitions represent a vindication of the blogging format for some observers, who see user-generated content as the news consumption medium of the future.
"The blogosphere is breaking out of its niche roots," said David Sifry, CEO of Technorati. "There's a lot of interest in the value of these things. No one can build it all…AOL gets it. They're smart."
Other observers saw the acquisitions as big media's attempt to understand what's happening at the micropublishing level.
"They're probably all figuring out that it's too difficult to build these things themselves, that the bloggers and the blogging companies are the ones closer to the grassroots level," said JD Lasica, founder of OurMedia.org. "They know in the long term that user-generated content will be how people access media."
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The response wasn't uniformly optimistic however. Several bloggers voiced their concern that media companies consider blogs to be old style content when they're really more akin to dynamic conversations that are unpredictable and not easily valued.
Weblogs Inc., for example, is comprised of approximately 100 blogs, of which only a quarter seem to be updated with any regularity.
"I think for AOL it's still more of a knee jerk, 'we need to acquire more content, we need to get a little piece of the blogosphere,'" said Jeff Jarvis, prominent blogger and former president of Advance.net. "But what happens when the blogosphere doubles in size in a few months? What are they going to acquire then?"
AOL's Miller, however, was uncowed. He said that AOL was positioning itself to grow along with the blogosphere, and that there was room for several different types of blogs and blog companies.
"Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a thousand flowers bloom, let a million flowers bloom," he said. "It's all good."
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