Edgeio takes on Craigslist and eBay
Edgeio Edges Toward Launch–and a Clash with E-Commerce Giants?
Edgeio is doing just what its tagline says: gathering “listings from the edge”–classified-ad listings in blogs, and even online product content in newspapers and Web stores, and creating a new metasite that organizes those items for potential buyers.The way Edgeio works is that bloggers would post items they want to sell right on their blogs, tagging them with the word “listing” (and eventually other descriptive tags). Then, Edgeio will pluck them as it constantly crawls millions of blogs looking for the “listing” tag and index them on Edgeio.com.
I really like the idea, as well as basically everything that takes advantage of the long tail. Tagging usually works well also. It would be interesting to see the percentage of CL and eBay posters/sellers that have blogs today versus one, two, and three years ago. People who sell random things only once in a while should have no problem posting to their personal blog and those that are “Power Sellers” can and should have a site dedicated for that business. The only issue is inertia / critical mass. I’m sure their marketing plan is very viral intensive. The most interesting part may be seeing how well a guy who spends his days reviewing web2.0 companies can execute.
