JW’s blog

edgeio allows people to publish listings, but it allows them to control how everything is published, discovered and consumed. Listings are items you sell/buy, rent, provide/request… Examples of listings are renting an flat, searching for jobs, providing the service to clean your house, or selling tickets for an event. edgeio gives you full control over your listings, and it’s easy to add and remove them. It doesn’t have any restrictive terms and conditions, the publisher finally decides to who he wants to sell it and how much it will cost.

To achieve this goal, they dynamically search blogs, from which its publisher added its URI to the system, for posts with the tag “listing”. Then, the listing is added to their system, with title, description, photo, tags… You can browse their directory of listings using tags, and when you want to buy it, you can contact the publisher.

One problem I saw when browsing is that sometimes, posts are accidentally added. For example, all bloggers testing edgeio and then blogging about it. They add their blog to edgeio, and after testing, they write a post about it with the tag “listing” in it. When edgeio then crawls their sites, it automatically adds that post, ending up in a listing with the content of the blog post. Of course, nobody would buy it, but it generates redundant content.

They should think about spam.

Another thing they should concern is spam. There are already a lot of spam blogs, and while these can be avoided by just not linking to it, it’s harder to remove it from this sort of sites. You can mark a post as spam, but how effective this is is not yet known. However, I think edgeio has great potential, and because it searches RSS-enables sites, it should be possible to expand their service to not only bloggers. If you provide a feed with tags and links to your site, you should be able to add a site that isn’t a blog.

You can read more about edgeio and how it works on their about page, and on the post on TechCrunch (written by Nik Cubrilovic, because Michael Arrington, a co-founder of edgeio, is on vacation)