09
October
2005
|
03:02 AM
America/Los_Angeles

Scoop: VeriSign is about to announce acquisition of Moreover Technologies...

. . . is it building a massive news and blogs tracker?


By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher


VeriSign is about to announce it acquired Moreover Technologies, the San Francisco based news aggregator. The acquisition price is around $25m according to SVW sources.


On Friday, VeriSign said it acquired Weblogs.com for $2.3m, which tracks weblog changes. The David Winer founded site, combined with Moreover, will give VeriSign the ability to track and publish the content of virtually all news producing online sites.


David Winer is one of the pioneers of blogging and a co-developer of the RSS syndication technology. VeriSign now has one of the largest ping servers--an extremely strategic position as RSS use explodes. It also controls the root DNS servers--these link all the web sites on the internet.


The move by Verisign signals an ambition to aggregate a catalog of infrastructure capabilities such as security, content, and authentication services used by many large commercial web sites. The new acquisitions will enable VeriSign to track most new content published online, and track who accessed it and where.