Today, VeriSign announced the acquisition of Moreover.com. For almost a year, we’ve been thinking, watching and discussing (internally and externally) what’s been happening in the blogosphere. By early spring, several trends emerged that were important to us:

• rapid, sustained growth of blogs
• convergence of mainstream news and corporate data with feed-based publishing
• increasing levels of spam in the blogosphere

The blogosphere was growing fast, and would soon outgrow its own infrastructure, and at the same time it was beginning to transcend the term “blogosphere” and establish itself as the new framework for Internet publishing for all kinds of information and content. In short, the blogosphere was going supernova.

It isn’t that we anticipated that the Internet would undergo “blogification” – although the ramifications of blogging are deeper and farther reaching than is generally acknowledged. Rather, the underlying technologies and processes which had proven themselves with bloggers were beginning to demonstrate their usefulness in areas that went far beyond blogging. While there’s something wonderfully humble about a simple ping, it represents a fundamental change, a re-organizing force in the way publishing occurs on the Internet.

If pings represented a new process for publishing network, then there would definitely be a need for a commercial, carrier-grade provider of ping services. Ping services are not a profitable business, in and of themselves. Pings are free by tradition and by necessity. Attempts to introduce cost or latency into the ping layer would be self-defeating; the network simply routes around such problems. A free, open, scalable service fabric for pings is a powerful base for us to build value-added services on, however.  It also happens to help with a growing problem for the blogosphere, which is a good thing, too. Double whammy.

Why Moreover?
Moreover represents a way to catalyze, accelerate and lead with this vision of RSS and feed-based publishing services. A great number of publishers we talked to had similar comments about the blogosphere: the model was interesting but the plumbing looked shaky, and some of the basic mechanisms for managing content distribution were immature, if present at all. Moreover has been an innovator in aggregating and syndicating news content, and has a lot of credibility with publishers in providing solutions to the problem. We believe that as part of VeriSign they will be able to do the things they’ve already been doing, but even better, and on a larger scale. In addition, we believe that the combination of the two companies will help us pursue excellence in these areas:
 

• completeness – widest, most diverse set of developed publishing sources anywhere
• richness – the deepest contextual and descriptive knowledge of content available
• freshness – the fastest, cleanest signaling and distribution of new content anywhere
• reliability – always on, always there, just works

The Moreover team has been successfully pursuing these goals for quite a while, of course. They have a proven business model, and hundreds of happy customers, to whom they currently provide billions of headlines every month. And it’s important to point out that Moreover doesn’t just provide search indexing; it’s harvesting technology combined with a refined editorial process make it an unequaled authority in relevance. Moreover doesn’t just know about keywords and terms in the content it processes. It develops a layer of rich metadata that is state-of-the-art for the industry. We believe the trends mentioned above offer an opportunity not only to leverage their existing efforts, but also to meet a much broader and emerging need – migration to a more efficient, more flexible and more consumer-friendly publishing framework.

Changing the Game
VeriSign and Moreover will combine to provide even better reach and better value through its existing array of services. But when combined with weblogs.com, and the shifts that are taking place in the marketplace, the combination will be uniquely suited to provide intelligent infrastructure for a new era of publishing. The status quo – publishers write stories, push it onto their web server and wait for customers to find it through direct access or through the indexing of search engines eventually crawling their pages – will remain a convention for some time to come. But increasingly, publishing in mass media as well as the corporate world will start to look a lot more like the blogosphere, at least in terms of the architecture. And it won’t be because of the hype of “Web 2.0” or the trendiness of blogging, but because the underlying model – publish > ping  > analyze > aggregate – simply works better than the old one.

Also, as has been made apparent recently, the issue of spam blogs -- splogs -- is reaching a crisis point. Splog filtering was one of the key services that got us involved in the acquisition of Weblogs.com's ping server. Moreover also runs a significant ping server, which means that VeriSign will be a gateway for an even wider share of the ping stream.  By combining VeriSign's own efforts toward splog filtering and Moreover's demonstrated skills in the area of contextual analysis and content validation, we believe we have the necessary elements to provide some real therapy here.

As part of VeriSign, Moreover will have the resources and operational platform to do what they do now even better, and on a bigger scale. More than that, though, the combined teams will have the assets and skills needed to lead in a more general way  -- by providing intelligent infrastructure for the new world of Internet publishing, from the once-a-month blogger to the manufacturing business that syndicates product information all the way up to the world's largest media organizations. In content signalling, metadata, feed management and distribution, the VeriSign+Moreover combination will provide customers with quality, manageable infrastructure that scales cleanly far into the future.

So, to the whole Moreover team let me say welcome aboard!

Now let's get to it.