It wasn't just a name sell, it was a service sell.
(That may not sound like a very difficult service, but there were scaling issues as time went on. And... at the time that it sold, $2 million wasn't much money, either.)
I believe that Verisign bought weblogs.com mainly because they wanted the name, not because of the service. The site was already losing traffic and becoming irrelevant when he sold it, due to the increasing number of much more useful related services such as Technorati. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, Technorati had a valuation of over 12 million dollars one year before Verisign bought weblogs.com for 2.3 million.
However, I think your contention that they didn't want the service is wrong, since they are still running it. Swing on over to http://www.weblogs.com and see for yourself.
You may think it was a dumb decision on their part. (I do. Weblogs.com did its thing back when the weblog world numbered in the hundreds or few thousands, but even pre-Twitter it was pretty obviously increasingly worthless at the time it was sold. Even if the tech side scaled, the social side did not.) But clearly they did want it, and still do want it enough to continue running it. (Though I wouldn't be surprised it gets shut down any day now...)
I don't think it has anything to do with his weblog. It has to do with the success of Blogger, and after that, blogging in general. If I had never maintained a blog, but owned the name weblogs.com, I would be 2.3 million dollars richer right now too. I seriously doubt that Verisign wanted weblogs.com because of their pingback system, seeing that it was becoming less and less relevant as Technorati and other similar sites grew.
But I do agree with his main point that his blog made money, and Dan Lyons is wrong.