Edgeio is an interesting idea. A start up from Mike Arrington from TechCrunch it utilises the increasing spread of tags to drive a listing service. Posting information on your own blog and tagging the post with listing will cause it to be picked up by the service and added to the lists.
Having the web2.0 essentials of rounded corners and graded fills it’s a nice looking site. Still in it’s early days, it only has around 600 listings and still has a lot of test posts…brain for sale anyone? On that post you can also see the ‘acknowledgement; process, with the trackback showing the post has been listed.
Search is by text or by categories, with a geographical filter thrown in as well. Once within a category, you can drill down further by increasing the number of tags that are being looked for, to narrow down the search.
On the face of it, a very simple idea. However, digging down into the FAQs (which I think need to be a lot more prominent) shows that to get the most of it you need to manage your tags very carefully, to prevent listings or to close listings. This may be a barrier to entry, being more complicated than a listing service ‘admin form’. Edgeio has its own ping server but also works with blo.gs and pubsub, so any tag or category labled listing is picked up, this menas that stuff can be listed unintentionally without ever being cleared off the system. They say they work actively to prevent spam and have a moderating team to add the human touch; the service is also self-policing, with users beign able to flag suspicious posts.
Overall, I like it. Now, all I need is something to sell…so see the next post.
