Bloglines Transfering Ownership to Merchant Circle

I received an e-mail from Bloglines/Ask.com informing me that they are transferring Bloglines to new owners MerchantCircle.com.

Per the Bloglines/Ask.com e-mail:

• Ask.com will maintain the current Bloglines service as is until December 1, 2010. After December 1, 2010, the service will transition wholly to MerchantCircle. During the month of December, you will be able to easily port your feeds over to the MerchantCircle-powered service. It's an easy process, and we.ll provide you with complete instructions well in advance.
• Logging-In: You will keep your same password as before.
• Current Bloglines features: Your Bloglines subscriptions will seamlessly transition to the MerchantCircle service, however, the Clippings Tab will no longer be available and you will not be able to transport saved articles to the new service. We're very sorry for any inconvenience this will cause; the infrastructure requirements and costs are simply too great to justify maintaining this type of archiving feature.
  

MerchantCircle is a directory of small and local businesses. The company offers services to those vendors such as advertising placement, web directories, web site hosting and other similar services.

I am really not clear on how this is going to be a good match. The general focus of MerchantCircle is to attract small business owners to help them connect with customers. Nothing wrong with that; support your local businesses when possible.

I have to be honest. When I did use Bloglines it was not to shop. It was to connect with those sites and blogs I needed to track or visit. I'm not totally opposed to ads that support a web business. I'm just not sure how these two different kinds of web services are going to mesh with each other.

My main concern is that I don't want my contact info transferred to vendors without my explicit permission. If I don't like it I want an easy Opt-Out process.

For more info you can visit the MerchantCircle blog or e-mail your questions.