After a few posts on aggregating "Web 1.0"-style classifieds, I finally have something to blog on a possible next generation of classifieds:
At last, there is some news on edgio, Mike Arrington's new venture. As expected from the little we knew before it is primarily an aggregator of classifieds on blogs. Somehow, I wondered why that took so long, since the idea has been on the table for quite a while, but on the other hand there is not much selling-via-blogs going on yet anyway. I hope that edgeio and similiar sites will change that.
From the description it sounds like a solid and complete implementation. They ask sellers to use the 'listing' tag to draw attention, and although the article claims that they will "constantly crawl millions of blogs", my guess is that they subscribe the technorati feed for that tag. In this way, they re-use all the anti-splogs mechanism technorati implements. That would be a very simple and neat model to aggregate things, one that could be copied for many different things, too. In fact many geoblogging sites rely on one way or the other on such a mechanism. And of course, for events it is commonplace now to agree on a tag, to aggregate all related material. Edgeio would - if I guessed right - take this one further, by using the tag only as a means to find a URL and then going further and actually download and analyze the page.
Since structured blogging and microformats seem like perfect matches for edgeio. I wonder wether they even demand the implementation of one of these models for posters in order to get some structure. But if they do, then they should really mine all blogs and use the listing tag only as a speedup mechanism (i.e. being the Web 2.0 equivalent of 'Submit URL' at the search engines).
The article mentions an interesting usage of trackback. It sounds like they will automatically trackback every post they find and include. While that sounds pretty intriguing, I fear it can quickly become very problematic. Essentially, the whole process is automatic mass-trackbacking of all people using the listing tag. Sure, there is value in this trackback, but where do you draw the line and who decides what useful is? And what if there will be 20 more aggregators? I think that every form of trackback that doesn't result from a human choice on the trackbacking site (usually hand-picking a link to the trackbacked site) borders to spam, especially if high volumes are in the game. Well, as the other of the article says, he is not sure that he got every detail right, and the people involved in the project are definitely deep thinkers and well aware of the good and bad potential of these techniques, so I stop speculation and have another look after the launch.
By the way, here in Switzerland, Kaywa is doing something in a similar market with ichiba. There aren't many details out yet, but from the little I heard they seem to take a slightly different approach, that might sit a little closer to the way classifieds work for users today.
Tags: classifieds, disruption, aggregators, listing :-)
Posted by seefeld at February 10, 2006 09:28