Champagne Velvet

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.

Originally uploaded by jbum.

It’s pretty amazing how quickly a new company, web site, etc. can become such a part of life that you forget what we did without it. Flickr’s birthday has made me think about a bunch of others:

• Amazon - 1995
• Craigslist - 1995 (on Usenet)
• eBay - 1995
• Google - 1998
• Napster - 1999
• BitTorrent - 2001
• iPod & iTunes - 2001 (iTunes was Mac only until 2003)
• Wikipedia - 2001
• Mozilla Firefox 1.0 - 2004

As well as ones I can’t believe have been around for so long:

• Plasma TV technology - 1964
• LCD monitors - 1968
• GSM - 1987

Multi-touch screen video from YouTube

this is like the Tom Cruise movie “Minority Report” on a screen…

Living in the future is cool.

So this is the video iPod, eh?

Think Secret can confirm…
This video iPod, which has been in development and on the table since before Apple released the 5G iPod last year with video playback, will feature a display that will occupy the entire front face of the device. Sources who have seen the device report that it features a digital click wheel, one that overlays the touch-sensitive display and appears when a finger touches it and disappears when the finger is removed.

Out. of. control. OLEDs? Badass, whatever it is, real or not.

Catholic Apologetics International

CAI will write a check for $1,000 to the first person who can prove that the earth revolves around the sun.

Along the same lines of reason (and I use the term as loosely as possible), I guess you could argue that the earth revolves around the moon, that the whole galaxy revolves around Jerusalem or Vatican City, or some other relativistic* nonesense. When there are nine (or eight or ten, depending on who you ask) planets with an orbit that centers around approximately the same point, it seems somewhere between absurd and institutionally insane to insist that all those objects are actually orbitting around the earth instead.

*Note: I don’t care if I’m misusing this word.  I’m not talking about the speed of light or the physics theory, I’m talking about the philosophical concept.

Update: Great challenge analysis summary here, asking the challenger for more details.