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.

About to leave for a New Year’s weekend trip - one night in Massachusetts and two in Vermont at Sugarbush - so it’s time to reflect before the year is through. It’s been a crazy year.

January:

• Starting to formalize plans to move to China and invest in real estate with Dave Weishaus; picked out the city; started to put together the investor list, etc.
• The plan was to get everything organized while wrapping everything up at GT Advisory for a move in June.
• Elsewhere,
• The world is still trying to organize aid for the countries hit by the tsunamis of December 26, 2004 and Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush get involved;
• There is a debate over the election results in Ohio with a full investigation and report - I continue to believe that there was fraud and that it goes at least as high as Karl Rove;
• George W. pissed off the entire city of Washington, D.C., with his over-the-top second inauguration and declares that his victory says that the war in Iraq is justified - I didn’t watch;
• U.S. officials announce that the search for WMD’s has ended - and the explicit reasons for the war change;
• Apple introduces the Mac mini and the iPod Shuffle at MacWorld - I look forward to the 2006 announcements especially re: Mac mini as home theater PC and to what extent HDTV is integrated; and
• Iraq holds the countries first multi-party election in 50 years, previous single-party ballots looked like this.

February:

• Art Chang throws in a very positive curve ball by deciding it was time for him to leave which basically forced me out of a job. This was somewhat surprising as I had been assured I could stay on, but in the end it saved me from wasting three or four months of my life.
• A few days later, after discussing my ideal internship to prepare me for moving to China, Art introduces me to Jim Runsdorf and Ken Cohen at Pantheon Properties. Pantheon and the opportunity fit the ideal: a small development firm where I could get involved in the entire deal process from sourcing to close to asset/property management and everything in between.
• I leave GT Advisory and begin at Pantheon on February 15th.
• I grew up asking my dad, a commercial and industrial broker, all kinds of questions about the real estate business never thinking I would be working in the industry. Based on that small platform, my somewhat-more-formal education in the business was exponential.
• The work environment is comfortable while encouraging ambition. If you get stressed out, there’s a hatchet and some wood to take it out on; there’s the terrace for an outdoor meeting or late afternoon drink. It’s a tight-knit group and a great place to be.
• Elsewhere,
• The New England Patriots win Super Bowl XXXIX over the Philadelphia Eagles with a hurt Terrell Owens (who played very well) and a “sick” Donovan McNabb (who didn’t);
• The Michael Jackson child molestation trial begins - my interest is minimal except that the parents letting their kids spend the night at Neverland are crazy;
• Carly Fiorina resigns as Chairman and CEO of HP;
• The US balance of trade deficit exceeds the previous record by 25%, even as the dollar continues to strengthen as the market views interest rate spreads as more important than other fundamentals; and
• Gary Bettman announces the cancellation of the NHL season which I can’t say I regret.

March:
• My plans for China continue as does my real estate education.
• Zhenning Guo gets involved in the China partnership.
• We start to finalize Pantheon’s acquisition of our parking lot in the Bronx.
• I go to the ACC tournament in Washington, D.C. with Amnon Meiri. Great trip, great basketball, just a shame that Duke won.
• Elsewhere,
• China started human testing on an AIDS vaccine;
• US Rep Henry Waxman accuses the Bush administration of withholding an audit on Halliburton until after the election (but is anyone surprised?);
• In what I believe will become THE biggest focus of attention (over oil, gold, foodstock, or anything else) over the next 50 years, NGO’s meet at the 3rd Annual Alternative World Water Forum and decry water privitization;
• MGM Studios v Grokster goes to the US Supreme Court;
• Terry Schiavo dies, which I think is a good thing no matter how crazy her husband was; and
• Doctors implant a microchip into a paralysed man’s brain - the chip “reads his thoughts” and allows him to “think his TV on and off, change channels” and more - the line between humans and androids continues to blur and society seems to accept it, as I do for the most part.

Organizing my thoughts and trying to figure out what I want to make this thing work. This is an email I sent to Zach on December 21st explaining what/where my thoughts were:

Things I want to be able to do:

• Categories
• Lists (books, movies, music, links, etc.)
• Non-blog pages
• Maybe RSS (I think mostly so that I can have it on my individualized Google page so that it will remind me to post)
• Would love to be able to use a toolbar to highlight text on a page and automatically blog it with the link the way you can with blogger. I know WordPress can use the blogger API but I’m not sure if you can do this. Any ideas?
• Get rid of comment spam
• Stat tracking – click throughs, page visits, etc.
• I’m sure I’m missing some stuff but that’s basically where it starts.

As a programmer, I don’t think I want to be locked into one of the hosted solutions, with blogger being the obvious choice. I’d also like to be able to easily throw up non-blog pages w/o it being a big deal.

Of the software packages, I’m heavily leaning towards WordPress right now – flexibility, ease of setup and open source all key.

I’m very comfortable in a unix/linux environment and have practically zero experience with windows servers so my choice there is pretty easy. Also, I have no PHP or ASP experience right now so I’m going to be learning one either way. This is also a reason not to pick WordPress (coded in PHP) but I’ll learn.

The WYSIWYG packages and “you don’t need to ever touch the code” stuff doesn’t really entice me even though I don’t see myself doing a lot of coding for a while.

MT is enticing and I have a feeling that I would have chosen it had I started two years ago or so. I didn’t research the project enough to know everything that’s going on with it right now but it looks like the free version is no longer being updated and it’s not open source. I also read that it can be more difficult to setup.

As far as hosting goes, I’m looking at the most basic plans on DreamHost and MediaTemple but haven’t gotten tremendously far in that research. GoDaddy somewhat scares me. Shared hosting is obviously more than fine with me.

Since then, Performancing released their fantastic Firefox extension which solves the “blogger API” / toolbar problem discussed above and I settled on DreamHost and WordPress. One holdup was that I decided to wait for the WordPress 2.0 release to avoid any upgrade issues since it was only a couple days away anyway. So far so good…