During a research I just came across Edgeoi, an aggregator of listings which are supposed to be collected from “the edge” of the web, i.e. blogs which are unstructured via full text as opposed to a site like eBay which has plenty of fields like title, category, price etc.
Although I like the extremely neat execution of the site, there are three things which make me doubt whether this site will work:
1. The name: Having three vowels at the end, is always confusing. So whenever I visit the site, every second time I don’t spell the URL properly. Admittedly, this could be also my own stupidity.
2. Although, since lately I am spending a good portion of my time looking at and dissecting new online applications around the Web 2.0 paradigm, it took me quite some time before I really understood the concept. Hence, my concern could be that this concept is a bit ahead of its time unless people are used to e.g. sell their car by just writing a few lines on their blog and adding an Edgeio-”listing”-tag.
3. Finally, the homepage of the platform indicates that the service is meant for listings in the broadest sense. However, from what I have seen there, a lot of posts don’t have ANYTHING to do with it as users – and that’s the crux of folksonomy- are able to literally tag anything. So just posts on world economy, terrorism and “my cat” would come up which could seriously jeopardize the very purpose of the site.
Let’s for the latter make a clinical trial here with these three totally unrelated tags:
Feeds
Content/links aggregation…Not that I am an expert in this area but I think the idea/concept is a little bit passé? It is almost like reinventing the wheel… I don’t know much about the technology behind this particular site but could it be based on a “spider” which crawl on the HTML code to make sense of the crux of each site? In terms of taxonomy, it still is riding on the old wave – the “Yahoo” and the “Excite” and even the “Lycos” of the early days of the internet…
Yes, perhaps, having a simple URL would also help. It is not only you who has the problem in spelling, most novice (mass market) would make this mistake easily…
Hmmm, personally, I don’t see this site flying high, then again, who am I to speculate. Some people have become millionaires out of nothing before the bubble burst!
Nx
LOL! I wonder how one can come up with such a stupid idea like edgeio.