Ask Jeeves buying Bloglines

Ask Jeeves will announce Monday its acquisition of Bloglines according to Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion. This is just further evidence that RSS technology and blogs are here to stay and that they are going to play a big role in the way we receive and search for information.

Though not viewed as one the big three (Google, Yahoo & MSN), Ask Jeeves is one of the fastest growing web properties on the Internet, providing consumers and advertisers with search products across a diverse portfolio of Web sites, portals and desktop search applications. It’s a very profitable company that’s been well respected in the financial community.

Bloglines is the most widely used service for searching, subscribing, publishing and sharing news feeds, blogs, and rich Web content. Bloglines aggregates its content via RSS feeds. With the acquisition, Ask Jeeves will now be collecting and indexing news & blog feeds from millions of sources. They would not be doing this if they did not believe blog content and the ability to access same were of significant value.

For lawyers and law firms, you get two things. One, assurance that bloglines will continue to be a leading place for your target audience to access RSS feeds from your blogs and two, knowledge that your blog content can be retrieved in more places – all the sites served by Ask Jeeves.