AOL Buys Blogsmith Software

Posted on November 12, 2006

Brian Alvey blogs that the Blogsmith blog publishing platform, which was used to build to Weblogs, Inc. blogs, has been sold to AOL. AOL also recently used Blogsmith to launch the AOL Music News Blog, the Fanhouse sports blogs and The Stump, a political blog network.

Then AOL launched two music blogs in Blogsmith: AOL Music News Blog -- which is better than you'd expect from the name -- and Spinner.com, an older domain reborn as a great indie music news blog. Following that they launched The Fanhouse covering NCAA football and the NFL and an elections blog which features Sam Donaldson's Ask Sam column.

That brings us to November and Blogsmith -- like Weblogs a year before it -- is now owned by AOL.

Obviously AOL likes our enterprise blogging platform, but I think the quality of Blogsmith's versatile team factored into AOL's decision -- maybe even in equal parts. I reclaimed the team members who had been on a "Netscape detour" and we've kicked off some major upgrades. We moved to a multi-city version of the platform. That was both the largest and smoothest server move I've ever been a part of. Right now my team is in Florida without me working on an overhaul of the publishing tools.

Alvey also briefly interviewed himself in his post by asking and answering the following question.

Is AOL going to release Blogsmith to the public as a Typepad/WordPress/YouTube/Wal-Mart/Starbucks-killer or not? Yes.

If AOL releases the software to the public it could make them competitive with other blogging platforms. Paid Content posted that Blogsmith also powers the TMZ.com gossip site offered by AOL. Valleywag says the Blogsmith software was sold to AOL for $4-5 million.

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