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Posts with tag: structured-blogging | Return to BloggersBlog.com Homepage
Edgeio to Aggregate Blog Classifieds
 Edgeio is a new startup from Michael Arrington who runs the TechCrunch blog. Edgeio is not yet live but they have an active blog here. Edgeio is a new type of listings service that will aggregate classified ads posted in blogs or feeds using tags. Tom Raftery, who has tried an Edgeio test post for an antique italian cabinet, says the Edgeio listings will be free.
The idea behind edgeio is that people can advertise items for sale from their website or blog and if they include the "Listing" tag with the post, the edgeio site will automatically find the post and List it on edgeio. Edgeio will therefore become a free version of Ebay (you won't have to pay to be listed on edgeio, you simply post on your site including the "listing" tag in your post) where you maintain ownership of the data!
Raftery also has some screenshots of the service and explains how Edgeio also offers sidebars that people can post on their blogs that list the items they are selling. The key to eBay is that people learn to trust the sellers over time -- eBay uses seller reviews to help screen out unreliable sellers.
Blogs may have an advantage here in that many people already trust the blogs they read. The big question is will people really want to post classifieds in their blogs and sell things from their blogs? UserDriven suggests that bloggers could create a second blog just for commerce.
One possible issue is whether or not bloggers will actually want to sell stuff off of their own blogs, but there are so many easy ways to work around that issue - bloggers can easily set up an extra "commerce blog" linked (or not linked) off of their main blog and/or edgeio can easily provide "commerce blog post" space off of their own platform - so this should not be an insurmountable issue in the least.
We talked about the idea of a second blog last year in a post about structured blogging. Classifieds are also one of the promises of structured blogging. For classifieds to work in either stuctured blogging or Edgeio it will have to very simple to use. Edgeio appears to be making use of the existing tag feature which should be helpful. A possible concern with using tags would be posts by spammers getting into the database but by allowing only posts from registered users they should be able to avoid spam at least in the short term.
Another question is how will Edgeio itself make money since they aren't charging for listings? The AMCP Tech Blog says Edgeio will charge sellers for top positions and they could also use the familiar third-party ad service like Google Adsense.
You maybe wondering just how Edgeio will make their cash. Well, they plan to charge powersellers 25 cents to get top positions on their listings page and they are looking into running a third-party contextual ad service, possibly Google Adsense. This will allow local sellers to have advertising in the right column. Edgeio creates RSS feeds for local listings, items for sale, and almost anything else you can think of. This is another area that advertising could be implemented. Anyone with a RSS-enabled website can publish content through Edgeio.
BusinessWeek also has a post about Edgeio on its Tech Beat blog. If enough people use the service then it might have a chance to become something big. However, it will take an enormous amount of listings to have anything close to the auction giant eBay. One big advantage eBay has over potential competitors is that its brand is so big that many people simply sell stuff through eBay at drop off stores. eBay also isn't operating completely in the dark -- they added RSS feeds last November.
Posted on February 26, 2006
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Is Structured Blogging Really Blogging?
InternetNews.com has an article about the new Structured Blogging Initiative that is finding both fans and critics in the blogosphere. Structured Blogging introduces new styles and tags that identify different types of content that could be posted in a blog such as reviews, items for sale, job listings, personal ads, etc.
Salim Ismail, cofounder of PubSub Concepts, told InternetNews.com that there is a lot of information in blogs that search tools can't find. Ismail also talked about how Structured Blogging could help compile information like personal ads and items for sale.
According to Ismail, when people post job listings or items for sale,
the data is owned by the Web site where it's posted, rather than by the
person who posted it -- and sellers often need to pay to post. Using the
schematics provided by the initiative would allow feed syndicators such
as PubSub to find such information and offer it to others in aggregated form.
Say you need a date. Right now, a single must pay to subscribe to and
search multiple dating sites, Ismail said. If individuals published their
datability using the structured formats, "You could say, 'I want all the
tall blondes from Sweden.'" Publishing structured data would allow people
to find things on blogs in a more interesting and useful way, he added.
Canter and Ismail emphasized that structured blogging could allow companies
to build new services that take advantage of the data, which could be stored
in shared repositories or distributed via services such as FeedMesh, a
service for sharing and distributing notifications of feed updates to which
PubSub is a major contributor.
It looks like the value in Structured Blogging has more to do with building a distributed classified ad network than improving blogging. It was mentioned a few months ago that blogs might one day be used to take on classifieds and services like Monster and eBay -- maybe Structured Blogging is the way this will happen. But does anyone really think of the posting of classified ads as blogging? Will bloggers want to post entries using Structured Blogging tags that offer their personal items up for sale? Wouldn't this interrupt the flow of some of the more serious blogs from a readers perspective? One possibility is that bloggers could set up a seperate "blog" for posting items like classifieds, help wanted ads and dating profiles using Structure Blogging formats but it sounds like a lot of extra work when these services already exist. Complexity may also be an issue. Ismail's "tall blondes from Sweden" example will only work if the tall blondes from Sweden can figure out Structured Blogging.
The article also includes some comments from some critics of the service including Stowe Boyd at Get Real and Greg Yardley. The article also mentions a competitor to Structured Blogging called Microformats.
Posted on December 15, 2005
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