LexisNexis announced yesterday that it had acquired Moreover Technologies, a company that provides aggregation, monitoring and distribution of news stories, blogs and social media.

The Moreover business will be housed under the LexisNexis Business Insight Solutions umbrella, but a LexisNexis spokesperson said that the acquisition is also important for its legal customers.

Moreover“We’ll combine Moreover’s flexible, user-friendly technology and leading web and social content with the comprehensive licensed news content from LexisNexis – creating a next generation current awareness solution that will be unmatched in the market,” said Christine Alberti, LexisNexis director of communications, in an email. “The new offering will launch in 2015 as LexisNexis Newsdesk.”

Moreover’s current Newsdesk product is used by companies for media monitoring, competitive intelligence and market research, as well as for sharing news within an enterprise.  Its Metabase and Search Engine Toolkit products are application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable its customers to integrate news content into their own systems and products.

Moreover was one of the first news aggregator sites on the Internet. Formed in 1998 by a group that included Nick Denton, who went on to found Gawker Media, it helped develop the original RSS standard for distributing news and blog content online in 2000, and it later owned Weblogs.com, the original ping server by which blogs notified servers that their content had been updated.

For many years, Moreover provided free news feeds for consumers around a variety of topics, but it shut those down in 2012.

Photo of Bob Ambrogi Bob Ambrogi

Bob is a lawyer, veteran legal journalist, and award-winning blogger and podcaster. In 2011, he was named to the inaugural Fastcase 50, honoring “the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries and leaders.” Earlier in his career, he was editor-in-chief of several legal publications, including The National Law Journal, and editorial director of ALM’s Litigation Services Division.