Ask Bloglines
I thought it was just a rumor and probably untrue, but there we have it, Ask Jeeves has bought Bloglines and the blogosphere is once again on fire. John Battelle has a few sentences from the people involved and presumes that the sale price was well above $25 Million, which I can only agree with. You can also check out what Mark Fletcher has to say himself, mostly being a few reassuring words that this was a great deal for all involved and things won’t change. The new Ask Jeeves Blog als has a post about the deal and they seem to be very committed to keeping this going in the right direction. No wonder, if you look at the size of Bloglines via alexa.com! Bloglines also added a special acquisition faq. Interesting to note there is that Mark Fletcher and his engineering team will remain onboard and guide the company. So there really wasn’t a meaningful sales staff yet I presume. :)
Looking at the Ask Jeeves Corporate Site there are some potential guesses as to where the synergies might end up with. Obviously, and already said by Mark himself, Teoma is a good thing for Bloglines to exploit and to bring really powerful search into their backend. In relation to making money some time down the road, MaxOnline seems to be a very good fit, as they seem to have a good sales force to sell advertising and already have some interesting solutions that can be further enhanced with knowledge gained through Bloglines. I really like Boomerang by the way, which tracks users on a corporate site and then allows the company to buy ads on the Ask Network. Very nice. Please show people that are interested in Apple only Apple ads via the entire network.
Their My Jeeves Beta also looks very interesting and the option to save your search results fits very well to the clipping mechanism in Bloglines. Integrating Teoma, allowing me to search related stuff to an article, allowing me to clip all that, categorize it for later retrieval, search over my clips, within my RSS feeds and searches, … this could get really interesting. Targetted advertising with this knowledge can be amazing.