(2005-02-05) Ask Jeeves Buys Bloglines

Ask Jeeves is buying Blog Lines.

Ross Mayfield reports Ask Jeeves sees this as a way of driving search traffic.

Jason Calcanis thinks this is a bogus deal (for Ask Jeeves) since there's no money to be made in RssAggregator-s. He addresses the Enterprise market only by saying that Fat Client-s will rule that market. I disagree, except to the extent that MsOutlook bundles a feature like that. Otherwise I think IT departments would rather manage 1 WebApp like a Portal rather than another desktop app being deployed on hundreds/thousands of machines.