Development of an open platform for listings continues with yesterday’s launch of Edgeio. This service picks up on blog post that are marked as a listing using a Microformat-like tag and collects them on a website for users to search through. They have some nifty interfaces in place to allow you to zoom in on listings that are close to you. One thing they haven’t addressed yet (but are aware of) is the problem of fake listings and spam.
Structured Blogging is working in the same field, but from a different angle (focussing on the bloggers, not the site that collects listings). I wrote about them earlier over here (in Dutch). The biggest challenge for the Edgeio crew is probably gaining critical mass to be able to compete with the likes of eBay.
Everyone was blogging about this yesterday, here are some of the posts: