Yesterday,
I posted about
Edgeio, a new free online service that aggregates classified ad-style postings from blogs and other sources via a special tagging scheme.
Almost immediately afterward, a virtually identical service, BlogBuy, launched. Both services are worth watching, and there's been some interesting analysis of this trend.
On Feb. 28, Techdirt observed, "It's an interesting way to try to get out from having all of that content 'owned' in a central place by the likes of Craigslist -- but what hasn't been made clear is what problem these sites are actually solving. We hadn't heard of people complaining that Craigslist and eBay were too centralized. Also, the business model here seems to be to pay for better listings -- but that relies on unhappiness with Craigslist and eBay again -- something that isn't at all clear."
Good point. While it remains to be seen whether either service achieves broad adoption, I think the general approach of aggregated rather than centralized listing has many possible applications. For instance, nearly every band has a blog, Web site, or other online presence. What if someone created an Edgeio-type service to aggregate listings for live shows? And what use might news and media companies find for that, via syndication or mashups?
