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Verisign Rumoured to have Bought Weblogs.com for $5M
Weblogs.com -- one of the oldest ping services, and not to be confused with Weblogsinc.com -- has been purchased by Versign for $5 million according to recent rumour.
New HitWise Blog
Hitwise who offer some excellent data on search engine usage and patterns have opened a blog. Given their exclusive data on search engines and their usage, they're in a position to offer some real insights.
Google Image Update
Search Engine Roundtable notes reports at WebmasterWorld that Google's image index has been updated. Google Images appears largely independent of their standard document index, so this should not reflect any major changes for non-image results.
MSN AdCenter US Pilot Begins
Back in September we reported MSN's new AdCenter contextual search ads service test launch in France and Singapore. Today, according to Oilman, MSN have begun their US pilot of the service by invitiation only.
Google Fusion, Google Purchase, and Google Virgin?
Given Google's tendency to leak upcoming projects via new subdomains (e.g. calendar.google.com), Ton Ruscoe had the bright idea of running a large word list against google.com's 3rd level domain in the hope of finding some potential new services, and he did.
His findings include:
- fusion.google.com
- purchase.google.com
- sandbox.google.com
- console.google.com
- jump.google.com
- d.google.com
- virgin.google.com
Google Goes to Washington
Google announce on their blog their new mission to defend users' rights, and the internet:
It seems that policymaking and regulatory activity in Washington, D.C. affect Google and our users more every day. It’s important to be involved - to participate in the policy process and contribute to the debates that inform it. So we’ve opened up a shop there. The first member of our Washington team is Alan Davidson, a veteran thinker and advocate for issues we care about. Our mission in Washington boils down to this: Defend the Internet as a free and open platform for information, communication and innovation
AOL Buys Weblogs Inc
PaidContent reports that AOL have acquired Weblogs Inc -- a company founded by Jason Calacanis which is one of the largest publishers of professional paid bloggers -- for an estimated $20 - $35 million:
This is a very quick exit: the company was founded about two years ago, and took some money from Mark Cuban a year down the line. For Calacanis, this is his second company being sold in a space of about two years...his original company Rising Tide Studios was first sold to Wicks Business Information, which in itself was bought out by Dow Jones. The company's blogs have had an exponential trajectory, with sites like Engadget, Autoblog, BloggingBaby, and others. In total, the company has about 130 bloggers, with about 15 full time employees, from what I know. AOL intends to keep the company/blogs separate from its site, much in the vein of what is happening with other blog and Web 2.0 companies being bought. But this is perhaps the first pure content-related company being bought out in the blog/ Web 2.0 space...or at least of this scale.
Yahoo Release User Product Review API
Yahoo developer network yesterday released their User Product Review API:
The User Product Review service allows you to display user reviews about a particular product. These reviews can be sorted in three ways: latest reviews, most recommended reviews or the highest rated reviews;either in ascending or descending order. See also the Product Search, the Merchant Search and the Catalog Listings services.