Edgeio: The Bleeding Edge

Miracle man Mike Arrington (along with partner Keith Teare) has done it again. While becoming one of the most influential bloggers in the blogosphere (so small feat in itself) in under six months may or may not qualify as miraculous, identifying an unmet market need (scooping/reviewing anything and everything Web 2.0) which results in one of the hottest, most in demand intangible of the tech world today is visionary, and inspired, to say the least.

Enter:

Already being chatted up quite a bit, Edgeio is brilliance 2.0, from where I sit. In the smallest of nutshells, Edgeio allows bloggers to add "listings" (classified ads) to their blogs via tags. Edgeio's bot crawls the Web seeking out these listings, then sends a trackback to the blog (or web site) when it finds them. BW's Rob Hof explains further:

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.

Also, Edgeio sends a trackback to the blog, providing a way for the blogger to go to Edgeio and modify the listing, adding other tags such as “autos” and other data that will further help the listing appeal to potential buyers.

The competition would seem to include Web 1.0ers like Craigslist, eBay, and Careerbuilder, along with newer-kids-on-the-block like GoogleBase, SimplyHired and Oodle.

Much more to come on this.

In the meantime Dave Winer gives a nod, as does Scoble. You can read the entire BW article here.

I, for one, (intended pun) am on the edge of my seat. Official launch is end February '06, right around the corner from the next TechCrunch party. Should be a fun one.