Raw

PaidContent.org report that Dave Winer's sold weblogs.com to VeriSign. First I'd heard of VeriSign showing any interest in blogs (they have one!), but -

CEO Stratton Sclavos announced in a presentation Thursday that VeriSign wants to provide infrastructure products to manage the increasing amount of Really Simple Syndication and Atom traffic generated by blogs and other sites on the Web.

VeriSign plans to provide feed, content and identity management products when it comes to RSS and Atom feeds. These products should help prevent RSS and Atom from being abused for spam, phishing and other common Internet-based threats, VeriSign executives said. The company has yet to give details of its product plans.

( news.com, May 2005)

That sounds good in itself, but there may well be a dark side to this. Stratton Sclavos sounds a, er… interesting character - he is (still is?) an advisor to Bush for starters. But this is the classic quote:

We have to move the complexity back into the center of the network and remove it from the edge.

(via Ross Mayfield)

So what have VeriSign got for their money? As far as I can tell, a fairly good domain name, and lots and lots of spam…

[Danny]