Yahoo is now operating blo.gs, one of a small group of “ping” services that connects and tracks blogs. The company purchased the service from Jim Winstead, who started it in 2002; as of the sale’s close, blo.gs now tracks 8,781,788 blogs for 12,237 users.
As Winstead, who isn’t staying on, explains: “Yahoo! obviously has the resources to run and improve blo.gs in pace with the incredible growth of blogs (and syndication in general), and in talking with them it was also clear that we had some of the same vision for the future of the service and the ping/notification infrastructure.
Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny was an advocate for the purchase: “What are our plans for the service? Simple. Keep it running, make it scale, and make it even better (a lot like the Flickr plans).” No financial details; one note, though—the “about” page urges would-be donors to support a worthy cause instead.
On a related note, here’s some conjecture about Google’s next purchases.