Promising Services
Structured Blogging, Technology and Software, Web 2.0
I wrote in the past that the challenge for data aggregator services, like Travbuddy.com, is to collect the data directly from Blogs and not to be depended on the users to submit data directly to the service provider. Recently I was exposed to two interesting approaches to handle this challenge: The first one, uPress, is a plugin to Wordpress by Asaf Arkin that allow you to create listing naturally in your blog post. I like this plugin for it simplicity and for its usefulness as demonstration of structure blogging. The following screenshot can demonstrate the simplicity of this plugin.
The second interesting approach represent by the new company edgeio.com which collecting listing by crawling RSS feeds looking for the tag word listing. Obviously edgio.com offers more than that, but the idea in it base is wonderfully simple and useful.
“ edgeio constantly monitors RSS enabled websites - today we are monitoring more than 25 million sites! Any item tagged "listing" and included in an RSS feed will be published on the edgeio website and through the edgeio network. Here’s how it works:
1. We monitor every RSS feed looking for posts having the tag "listing". Using Ping Servers this process happens within seconds of new content being published. Click here to see how Ping Servers work and which Ping Servers edgeio supports.
2. New items found with the "listing" tag are automatically added to edgeio where they can be discovered using search or by navigating our real-time taxonomy. The edgeio taxonomy leverages all tags used to describe an item and a concept called Clustered Tagging. Click here to learn more about edgeio’s taxonomy and clustered tagging.
3. Using trackbacks and comments, publishers are notified when their items are added to edgeio. Click here to learn more about trackbacks. 4. Publishers can claim their blogs using the edgeio website. Once claimed, items can be enhanced by adding additional tags, including metadata like price, and specifying where the item is located. Click here to learn more about claiming blogs. 5. Content published through edgeio is automatically made available to our partners through an open set of APIs. This provides even more exposure to publishers. 6. Users who discover an item on edgeio can contact the publisher via email. edgeio creates an anonymous email address for each item in order to protect publishers from spam. Click here to learn more about anonymous emails.”
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Rogel @ February 20, 2006
I think it’s incredibly exciting. What we’re seeing here is a lot of work to break down barriers, make it easy for people to participate, and form their own online identity.
It’s bigger than just one service, and it’s going to make a change on the way we participate online. 2006 will be a great year.
It is indeed exciting and I thing that once we will have standards of Data gathering the results can be amazing. for sure it will change the nature of search, specialized services etc.
I’m waiting to see what are you going to develop from uPress…
[…] A while ago, and not only once, I wrote about my disappointment from those services that rely on “user generated content” in direct manner. I claimed than, I much more convinced now that “user generated content” is a great idea if it’s done without bothering the user. Even good ideas, like Squidoo that is making interesting attempt to build credibility into search, are failing to attract and retain the masses because they require work, with very little obvious return. Moreover, observation on successful services – such as Google or Amazon, demonstrates that gathering information from the user has to be indirectly. Michael Arrington’s criticism on Squidoo is touching this issue: The best lenses are generating $30 or so a month for the lensmaster. A true expert on a topic could generate many, many times that number by creating a blog, along with some static content, and putting up simple Google adsense ads. So top content producers are not going to be heading to Squidoo for the money, ever (Squidoo’s model is set up in such a way that they could never make as much money from a lens as they could on their own). And besides, the blog format just works better for experts – fresh content generates lots of links, which equals traffic and search engine juice. The only unanswered question is whether or not experts will go to Squidoo even without the financial incentive. Maybe, but Squidoo’s tools are not particularly advanced – self publishing is easy these days. It seems like Michael understood, and is making a very interesting attempt to implement in his new company , the idea that content need to be gathered from the users without generating additional work for them. And this simple statement summarizes it pretty well:” [user will not come] because they don’t want to generate content, they want better life” Edgeio, innovation, search, Squidoo, User Generated Content, Web 2.0 […]