Internet services company VeriSign announced on Friday that it has acquired Weblogs.com's ping service, which automatically alerts people when blogs and other websites are updated with new material, reports the Associated Press. VeriSign said it paid $2.3 million in cash to Scripting News Inc. to purchase Weblogs.com, founded by blog and RSS pioneer Dave Winer.

Weblogs.com started as a host for bloggers before Winer transformed it into a "ping" service that provides automatic notification to subscribers using RSS.

Winer told the AP that Weblogs.com, which is sending nearly 2 million pings a day, had grown too big for him to handle: "Keeping the site running was a perpetual challenge. We would scale, and it would just grow exponentially."

Verisign said in a statement that it plans to use the service to "provide more stable and reliable communications" for blogs and that it would continue to operate Weblogs.com as a free service. But Verisign could charge for additional services in the future, according to a company spokesman.

More info is available at Scripting News and a Verisign blog.