The stealth startup from techblog overlord Michael Arrington called Edgeio has done it’s first public demo and word is now out about what they’re doing.
On first glance, I like it. One of the ideas I’ve been annoying my friends with is a decentralized classified ad system. Edgeio is really close to my idea with their idea of taking blog listings and other ad listings that may be tagged with a label like “listing” that Edgeio would then index for their site. It sounds like they’re touting that it’s decentralized and on the edge, and one end of it is. But it still sounds like you have to go to Edgeio to browse listings and buy.
What I’d like to see is a decentralized system that allows bloggers/publishers/newspapers/whoever use a form on their site that allows users/themselves to post ads to this decentralized service. I hadn’t thought about Edgeio’s ideas of indexing tagged content, that’s a nice idea as well. Then, I’d like for bloggers/publishers/companies to also be able to pull ads from the decentralized listings based on tags. Here are two examples of how this could be used.
1. My employer Right Media could use a form provided by the classifieds company and add our open job listings with tags like rightmedia, advertising, job, etc. Then we could also pull these listings from the service to display on our website. We’d just select to show all ads tagged “rightmedia”. So this service is helping us manage the ads on our site, but this would also allow other job sites or whoever to grab our ads to show there as well. This provides Right Media with more exposure for our ads from anyone pulling job listings from the service, as well as providing job sites with more content. All kinds of specialty ad sites could grow from such a service that chose to display jobs for certain industries.
2. My content site Wakeboarder.com already has a classified ad forum. But the users who post there only get exposure on Wakeboarder.com. If I had a classified form that put these ads into a decentralized service, then other wakeboarding sites could grab these ads. In turn, I could also grab any other wakeboarding-related ads that had been posted to this service from other places.
Local sites could pop up, specialty niche sites, and anyone who publishes a website of any kind could probably collect or post ads from it that were relevant.
What’s the business model? I haven’t thought that much about it, but I imagine like Craigslist that once it had scale, you could charge for people who were posting certain type of ads. I’m sure there’s ways to monetize it in other ways.
So if I had to give Edgeio advice, I’d say allow people to pull listings from your service as well. They’d get way more exposure. Then also provide me some sort of web form as a publisher that I could use to send ads placed on my site to you.