Weblogs.com is a website created by

UserLand Software UserLand Software is a US-based software company, founded in 1988, that sells web content management, as well as blogging software packages and services. Company history Dave Winer founded the company in 1988 after leaving Symantec in the spri ...

and later maintained by

Dave Winer Dave Winer (born May 2, 1955, in Queens, New York City) is an American software developer, entrepreneur, and writer who resides in New York City. Winer is noted for his contributions to outliners, scripting, content management, and web servi ...

. It launched in late 1999 as a free, registration-based

web crawler A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing (''web spid ...

monitoring weblogs, was converted into a ping-server in October 2001, and came to be used by most

blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order s ...

applications. Web-services like Feedster and

Technorati Technorati was a search engine and a publisher advertising platform that served as an advertising solution for the thousands of websites in its network. Technorati launched its ad network in 2008, and at one time was one of the largest ad network ...

monitor Weblogs.com for its list of the latest blog posts, generated in response to pings via

XML-RPC XML-RPC is a remote procedure call (RPC) protocol which uses XML to encode its calls and HTTP as a transport mechanism.Simon St. Laurent, Joe Johnston, Edd Dumbill. (June 2001) ''Programming Web Services with XML-RPC.'' O'Reilly. First Edit ...

. The site also provided free hosting to many early bloggers.

History

In mid-June 2004, Winer temporarily shut down free blog-hosting services there, without any notice, citing server and personal problems. Criticism from many

bloggers A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order s ...

was intense. Dave Winer, who had originally promised to get the blogs back up and running within a two-week period, was able to restore them much faster thanks to help from

Rogers Cadenhead Rogers Cadenhead (born April 13, 1967) is a computer book author and web publisher who served from 2006 to 2008 as chairman of the RSS Advisory Board, a group that publishes the RSS 2.0 specification. He graduated from Lloyd V. Berkner High Schoo ...

. According to Wired Magazine, "What was decried as the death of a blog universe when Dave Winer shut down free blog host Weblogs.com turned out to be little more than a four-day server outage surrounded by a heck of a flame war." In October, 2005,

VeriSign Verisign Inc. is an American company based in Reston, Virginia, United States that operates a diverse array of network infrastructure, including two of the Internet's thirteen root nameservers, the authoritative registry for the , , and gene ...

bought the Weblogs.com ping-server from Winer, promising that services currently free there would still be free. The

podcasting A podcast is a program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. For example, an episodic series of digital audio or video files that a user can download to a personal device to listen to at a time of their choosing ...

-related web site audio.weblogs.com was also included in the $2.3 million deal. In May 2009 Weblogs.com was sold to a private investor group as part of the deal that saw

Moreover Technologies Moreover Technologies (generally known as "Moreover") is a provider of business intelligence, media monitoring and news aggregation products for enterprises, also offering free news feeds for consumers. Moreover was founded in 1998 by Nick Dent ...

divested from VeriSign.Moreover 3.0: We divest out of VeriSign
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References

{{reflist Blog hosting services

History

See also

References