The company that Nick Denton, Angus Bankes and I started on my kitchen table in Shoreditch, in 1998, sells to Verisign – I can’t comment, but Tom Foremski has the scoop and Rafat Ali more details, including a link to a good piece on Moreover by Jason Kottke, who use to work in my team:
Moreover was early on some things, news search before Google news and RSS and weblog search. The thing that we did with Evan and Meg, from Blogger, Newsblogger, was kinda cool – and we almost bought Blogger, but who knows.
I have been banging on about the importance of ping servers for a while, perhaps Versign with Moreover and Weblogs.com can do something or perhaps another startup will.
Whatever happens, the architecture of online publishing is changing and with it, the entire architecture of search – pinged instead of crawled. That is a very big deal for Google.