I’ve Said Too Much

There’s some fascinating stuff from Verisign on their acquisition of Weblogs 2.0: why it happened, and what it means:

Not only are we running the DNS Registry and the largest TLDs (.com/.net), we handle hundreds of millions of transactions every month in the areas of mobile telephony, ecommerce payments, and instant messaging among other things. As we look ahead a few years, we see a future in which pings are generated not just by the millions per day, but by the tens and hundreds of millions. The blogosphere will continue to grow – rapidly – but we already note signs that RSS and the mechanics of feed-based publishing will extend well beyond the blogging perimeter, and be adopted as an enabling technology in areas like mainstream media publishing and corporate data distribution. In short, we believe that it won’t be long before terms like ping, feed, and trackback become part of the conventional lexicon for Internet publishing as a whole, not just the realm of blogs.

That to me seems like almost another definition of Web 2.0 (yes, I know, not another one). But a world where pings are being thrown back and forth is by definition a world in which information is being shared mechanically and dynamically, where the act of publishing means something more profound than just putting up a web page, it means chucking something into the pingosphere where it adds to the value of the system. Content itself becomes a network.