Unlike eBay's existing blogs and forums, which focus on more traditional (and sanitized) corporate communications, eBay Ink aims to give readers a peek inside eBay's internal operations. Brewer-Hay has pledged to write unbiased entries about what he observes as an all-access employee of the $7.7 billion dollar company.

Though eBay Ink is not a direct response to the recent seller boycott and frustration over ongoing changes, eBay's communications team says that a forum for frank discussions is long overdue. "There hasn't been one place where investors, industry analysts, employees, [eBay] buyers and sellers, and PayPal and Skype users can talk to someone from the company, or listen to someone from the company discuss what changes mean from a high level," said company spokesman Jose Mallabo.

Brewer-Hay was hired in January and has spent the past two months learning the ins-and-outs of the corporation. Fortune Small Business got first crack at him; below are edited excepts of our conversation about his ambitious mission and why he believes eBay Ink, launching in April, will change the dynamic between eBay's top executives and its user community.

eBay will launch a new blog in April that it told Fortune Small Business would be an unfiltered link between users and the company. Two things just jump out at me. First, the newly hired blogger has never sold anything on eBay. And secondly, while he says the first thing he did when he got to eBay was to meet with industry bloggers to find out "how we can work together," he has never reached out to AuctionBytes.

Other industry bloggers who linked to the FSB article do not mention having heard from him either: Randy Smythe, PowerSellers Unite and Tamebay, for example.

FSB: Your blog will be linked from eBay's PR webpage. How much influence will eBay have on what you write?

RBH: My words go straight up onto the blog, unedited.

It's got to be transparent. There's got to be an authenticity to it, an honesty to it, otherwise there's no point in doing it in the first place. I'm going to open up my e-mail to questions from folks. People can comment, too, and comments are going to be open. You're going to get the good, the bad, and the ugly.

It kind of goes back to what I was saying at the beginning. They hired from outside the organization. I have no prior agenda with any of the execs or people in the company. I'm still in the process of getting to know them. I haven't met a lot of them yet. That's a big, important thing.

The other thing is, this is my job. There are no other jobs that I'm doing. Some corporate blogs are just side gigs for existing employees, but I'm doing this 100%, day-to-day.

High-flying startup StumbleUpon has been rumored to be in acquisition discussions since at least last November. Recently we've heard that talks have heated up again, with Google, AOL and eBay as potential suitors. A source with knowledge of the deal now says the company has signed a term sheet with eBay to be acquired. The price is somewhere between $40 - $75 million. (update: GigaOm is now reporting the price at a $40 - $45 million).

StumbleUpon lets users rate websites via a browser toolbar. At any time a user can click "Stumble!" and will be taken to a website highly rated by other StumbleUpon users who tend to vote in a similar way as the person "stumbling." More often than not, it's something almost serendipitously interesting to the reader. The company expanded into video referrals in late 2006.

People who are passionate about StumbleUpon say they like it because of the surprise factor in what they see next, and the fact that the product has such a high hit rate in delivering interesting new content. The StumbleUpon site says they have 2.1 million users, up from 1.7 million in December 2006. 4+ million sites are "stumbled" daily.

StumbleUpon has only raised a single $1.5 million round of seed financing.

An eBay Blog (Web log) gives you an online publishing tool to share your opinions with the rest of the eBay Community. Blogs can be used for a variety of purposes: to enhance an eBay store, share personal experiences or talk about collectibles you like to win on eBay. What you write on your eBay Blog is up to you because it's all about you.

Members can already use RSS to keep an eye on the Announcement Board, the eBay Discussion Boards, or listings from specific eBay Stores. This week we're adding RSS support to our eBay Search pages. With this enhancement you can create a custom RSS feed that will deliver the results of your eBay Search to you via any RSS reader. Since we are integrating the RSS support with our Advanced Search pages, you'll have complete control over how you narrow down your search.

To subscribe to a RSS feed, you'll need an RSS reader or aggregator to gather and view the updates. Several free and commercial RSS readers are available, and some examples can be seen here (provided by dmoz.org). Once you have an RSS reader, simply go to the bottom of any RSS-enabled page you are interested in, click on the RSS button, copy the URL from the page that opens, and paste it into your reader to display the content in RSS.

RSS continues to penetrate the mainstream market, as companies like eBay educate their users to the value of search syndication. These actions continue to validate the collective cause of what many start ups have been pushing for some time now-Feedster included.