Stickis and BlogRovR: the conversation is everywhere

Yesterday, Wednesday Februrary 9, 2006, I attended SD Forums SearchSig entitled “Classified Search: All Your Ads Belong to Us?” MC’d by Simplyhired ’s Doug McClure and moderated by the Kelsey Group ’s Greg Sterling.

Panelists were:

There was an interesting discussion on market characteristics of classifieds, with each panelist focusing on slightly different approaches to the market. Oodles’ thoughtful and eloquent CEO, Donato put it best, characterizing a classified as distinguished from other ads in that they are perishable , geographic , and social . By this he meant they have a high time-value, once the item is gone it is gone for good, that frequently the item’s locality is important (housing, cars), and that transaction involved has a social component, and takes place partly on-line and partly off-line.

“People on Ebay are concerned about quality,” he quipped, “people on craigslist are concerned about their personal safety.”. With locality comes personal proximity, leading to a digression about personals on craigslist where it was posited that there was no ‘transaction’ to which Sterling responded that this depended on what one meant by transaction.

The panel recognized that the boundaries between traditional classified ads, served well by the local newspaper industry, which Keath Teare says “is one of the areas of the newspaper industry still doing well,” and the ebay - style power-seller or storefront is blurring, and that tools and platforms for one will need to address the other. It was also accepted by most of the panelists that the former, the one-off used-sofa market, would probably be served for free on the web, while profits will come from real-estate, car dealerships, and other high profit margin, volume businesses, which will depend on on-line classified services for a measurable source of qualified leads, in what Donato terms lead-supported business models.

”People,“ Donato claims, “will pay for conversion, not distribution,” much in the way that online advertising has moved from a CPM (cost-per-impression) model to a CPC (cost per click) model.

Speaking of lead-supported business models, the highlight of the evening was the first ever unveiling of Michael Arrington (of Techcrunch fame), and Keath Teare’s, Edgeio . Mike A. has used his vantage point at the locus of Web2.0 product design to come up with a really novel idea, something pretty uncommon in this white-hot area.

Edgeio is a republication platform for user-created classified content, taking in classified or for-sale information from user-created sites (blogs), and making it available via their own search interface. That by itself would be no more than a vertical classified search engine (in their case one with a wonderful interface and design), but what is most novel about their approach is the ‘O’ in Edgeio, which stands for out. They make all the data garnered and search results produced freely available for republication through an RSS-based query mechanism.

Keath points out that they create value in taking an ad that may be up on one individual’s not too well-read blog, and give it life and presence across the web to any and all services that might want to pick it up and republish it, thereby multiplying the audience manyfold.

The interface is lovely and usable, bearing the inspired imprimatura of Portuguese wunderkind designer Frederico Oliveira of Webreakstuff . The architecture is based on blogworld standards, blogposts tagged “Lisiting” are picked up by Edgeio through pingservers, which then communicates with the poster via trackbacks, affording the poster the opportunity to use the Edgeio interface to add relevant details and categories, even incorporating some exciting leading edge microformat support.

Listings are then classified, cleverly geocoded into regions, and made available either through Edgeio’s own search interface, or through RSS supported queries.

Another fantastic feature of their search interface is concensual and convenient access to the lister’s various reputations on ebay, linkedin , etc., a nicely Web2.0-ish way of accessing the heretofore siloed identity information providing confidence in personal transactions.

“Where’s the business?” asks Greg Sterling, in his analyst role. Keith responds there will be three sources of income: preferred positioning in results, partnering for local advertising (similar), and a service to provide lists of registered searchers whose searches are not being fulfilled, that is qualified leads, for pay.

The business problem presented by not being a walled garden, and allowing data to be republished (“data wants to be free” or maybe “Let My Data Go!” should be Mike Arrington’s tagline) is how to still monetize it. Atuned to that, I asked Keith whether they intended to anonymize the provenance of the ads, ala Craigslist , so that Edgeio is needed to make the market, to link the seller to the buyer. He confirmed that this is in fact what they are doing, a concession they needed to make the data free but still be able to capitalize on it. Data wants to be free, but one can’t let it ALL be free and make money! This makes total sense, and is a very clever meld of freeing information to make the marketplace big, while keeping control.

All in all, Edgeio seems to me one of the more novel services to come around since, say, Activeweave . Whether it is protectable, replicable, etc is another story, but I strongly believe they have a hit on their hands. It launches February 27th, with their official coming out at Esther Dyson’ s (an investor in Activeweave, and on our board of advisors), PCForum , in Carlsbad, Ca on March 12 to 14.

The best line of the evening was once again Donato’s: “The dark underbelly of free is SPAM.”

Other notables attending included Rohit Khare of CommerceNet , Tantek Çelic of Technorati , Activeweave’s own investor and board member, Eric Di Benedetto of Convergence Partners , and Assaf Arkin of Intalio .

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