Ask Jeeves Inc. is expected to announce today that it will acquire Trustic Inc., the company that operates blogging firm Bloglines. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Bloglines' free service aggregates and allows for the sharing of nearly 300 million articles, RSS feeds, blogs and rich Web content.
Daniel Read, vice president of product management at Ask Jeeves, Oakland, CA, said that Bloglines would still operate as its own entity but that Ask Jeeves will look at ways to integrate the two services.
“By joining forces with Ask Jeeves, we will be able to accelerate our growth with access to the millions of unique visitors to Ask Jeeves’ properties,” said Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher. “And we are eager to take advantage of Ask Jeeves’ support, extensive resources, operational scale and innovative technologies to expand and improve the services we deliver to users.”
Fletcher will join Ask Jeeves as vice president and general manager of Bloglines.
The acquisition brings together complementary technology assets, including Bloglines’ RSS aggregation capabilities and Ask Jeeves’ Teoma algorithmic search technology. Ask Jeeves plans to leverage the technologies across its search and portal brands.
The acquisition will allow Ask Jeeves to add different methods of creating and accessing searches.
“Through both Bloglines and My Jeeves, users will be updated in a really easy way, versus e-mail alerts,” Read said.
Read envisions that My Jeeves users will be able to create their own personal Web and RSS feed.
“Imagine getting an RSS feed to your Amazon Wish List, and comparing that with other people’s Wish Lists,” he said, giving an example of a possible future application.
Christine Blank covers online marketing and advertising, including e-mail marketing and paid search, for DM News and DMNews.com. To keep up with the latest developments in these areas, subscribe to our daily and weekly e-mail newsletters by visiting www.dmnews.com/newsletters
