I have once again been in the process of analyzing the new and existing blog platforms since the information in my last analysis in mid-July 2005 in my post titled Blog Platform Option Analysis may need to be updated. I am not quite finished with my analysis yet and will post my results when I am finished compiling them. In the process of researching platforms I stumbled upon the product called Edgeio, which I initially thought was a blog platform, so I emailed Edgeio support and they replied letting me know that Edgeio is not a platform. So I did more research and began to think Edgeio was some sort of extension package for current blog platforms. I continued to ponder, what is Edgeio? I can only speculate that the name name "edge" and "io" suggests that it intends on people (the edge) inputting data (the i) and
receiving data (the o). So I did more digging and found this Classified Listings 2.0 focus statement on Archimedes Ventures LLC website which is owned and operated by Keith Teare and Michael Arrington of TechCrunch:
“Classifieds is a market segment largely served by two entities, newspapers - primarily local - and online companies like eBay and Craig’s List. We believe that the emergence of structured blog publishing and Semantically tagged content will create opportunities to remake the entire model for Classified advertising. We have invested in edgeio as part of our efforts in this area.”
So it sounds to me like Edgeio is going to be using structured blogging to enable the creation of classified listing sites to compete with craigslist, the local newspaper classifieds, and GoogleBase. Edgeio is currently being beta tested as it is prepared to soon be launched to the masses. No dates are currently available but Edgeio is collecting email addresses so that it can inform potential users when it is ready for launch. So out of all my blog platform research and initial confusion, I uncovered Edgeio a Web 2.0 product that appears to be for classified listings and to be launched soon. I cannot wait until Edgeio is released so I can put my assumptions aside and truly determine what Edgeio is.
