Russell Beattie

EdgeIO just launched, so I figured I'd give it a whirl. This post had my magic claim code during the first edit, and an actual listing below. I think their choice to use URIs for field identifiers is wonky, but maybe it's meant to work across all types of blogging platforms or drive traffic as a side-effect? I'm not sure, but it seems to be a bit obtuse. I don't use categories (i.e. tags) in my RSS, so I'll start by manually adding the category tag link to get me indexed, then pop some info about the product (a phone, natch) below.

Listing, Electronics: Nokia 6010 Mobile Phone, locked to T-Mobile. Used. Price $25.

94025 Menlo Park California USA

Expires: July 16, 2006

It'll be interesting to see if EdgeIO can make this work. It's an idea that's been out there for a while. There was that Googlebot semantic web thing back in 2002, and I wrote my thoughts on the concept which I only grokked a year or so ago after reading The Perfect Store about the history of eBay:

In other words, eBay disintermediated many of the middle-men that had developed generations before the Internet came along. Weblogs and some interesting XML, could disintermediate eBay. Search engines would allow users to find the goods for sale (and make their money, as they do now, from the index of the goods for sale, not from the sale itself - look at Froogle). There would no longer need to be an arbitrary “virtual marketplace.†Think of a weblog where the comments aren’t for comments, but for bids instead? I’m sure someone else has thought along these lines, but it’s an interesting idea.

Kinda cool to see this stuff finally happening, hey? And now we get to see if all these neat idea matches reality... Cool beans!

-Russ

Update: Hmm. Something's wrong... either it doesn't like the category listing, or the fact I don't have comments enabled or something. Not sure.

Update 2: Okay, it worked. But it used the entire blog post as the entry, so I deleted it from their search because it's not exactly a for sale post. It took a while to get indexed, but it showed up with the right area, price, etc. Basically, all you have to do is create a title like "Nokia 6620 For Sale", throw in an image and description, with a few hrefs pointing at the tags, and it shoudl be listed. The potential for spam though is out of this world. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

It's too bad those guys haven't integrated PayPal or something into the mix yet - right now it's a search engine only, and doesn't help with the transaction. That'll be the next bit it seems to me: a big "Buy Now" button enabled next to your listing.