VeriSign Acquires Moreover

The content story of the day is the announcement that VeriSign has acquired Moreover Technologies for approximately $30m.  This transaction follows hot on the heels of its recent purchase of Weblogs.com for $2.3m.

This is an intriguing move by VeriSign, best known for its network infrastructure business.  Its rationale is that the blogosphere has defined a new framework for publishing content on the Internet but the fragmented supporting infrastructure is having trouble keeping up. 

The advent and growing popularity of blogs and RSS feeds have changed the dynamics of where and how information is consumed and is turning traditional online publishing on its head.  As is so eloquently described in this post on VeriSign's own blog (which gives an insider's view on this transaction), the humble ping, a mechanism for bloggers to notify all those interested that they've published some new content, is responsible for this paradigm shift. 

The ping has enabled companies such as Moreover to tag and syndicate harvested content in a structured feed, all in real-time.  It has also enabled RSS readers to provide the content consumer with relevant stories delivered to their desktop without having to manually go and seek out new stories of interest on the web.

Increasingly, traditional media and corporate websites will adopt the same publishing model as the blogosphere and VeriSign wants to be at the forefront of building a resilient and scalable real-time content distribution platform - "the plumbing" - to support this.  You can read a summary of a PaidContent.org interview with senior executives of Moreover and Verisign here.

Watch this space!