dekstop: weblog

The last time I wrote about it this was little more than an extrapolation of what was happening, but now (only weeks later) we're getting beaten over the head with it.

This is what I see when I search my memory and feeds archive of the last couple of weeks for the term "buys":

• eBay buys Skype
• Yahoo buys Upcoming.org
• News Corp buys IGN
• Google buys Meetroduction
• Fox buys MySpace
• Verisign buys Weblogs.com
• AOL buys Weblogs Inc. (not related)
• eBay buys Verisign Payment Services

... and most of these businesses were traded for unholy sums of cash. Note how the left hand side of all transactions is comprised of a very limited set of companies. Note how the right hand side of all transactions points to some of the same trends everybody's already talking about. Note how nobody wants to be left behind (it'll be interesting to see how Google integrates Meetroduction, and how Yahoo integrates Upcoming.org).

To prevent any confusions between Weblogs, Inc. and Weblogs.com:

• Weblogs.com is mainly a blog ping service, which means blogs notify this service when they have new content, and others can use it to watch the world talk. Like Technorati for machines, only older and probably larger in terms of traffic count. One of the maintainers/sellers is Dave Winder, the father of RSS, OPML, podcasting and early blogging software (Radio Userland etc).
• Weblogs, Inc. is a large network of commercial blogs, several of which are pretty popular. All are basically clones of the same concept adapted to a different topic, some of which are occasionally interesting to read. I read Engadget, the Social Software Weblog, TUAW, and sometimes others.

I won't introduce the other companies, but close with some random notes:

The eBay/skype transaction probably was the biggest surprise. It's easy to see why search engines are interested in "location-aware social networking software" (think Google Maps), why media companies are interested in content publishing communities (both infrastructure and actual content), and why Fox is interested in the apparently most popular meeting ground for American teenagers on the web.

Let's see how this changes the customer experience over the next year. I'm still fearing for Flickr.

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