Technology: March 2006 Archives
After having our own stand on the CeBIT for two years, we have decided not to go this year. The reasons are the high cost of stand space, the length of the show and the decreasing number of business visitors. Though I always liked going to the CeBIT, this decision saves me a lot of time, as I don't have to prepare the stand, and will stay at the office during the two weeks that I normally need for the CeBIT. One of the things I will be doing during these weeks is contacting visitors of our stand during the previous years and polling their interest in our products.
On the other hand, I won't be able to rome around to find interesting new products as the Ultra-Mobile PC. But I will try to spot new POS products through press releases and corporate sites, and publish these on the Point Of Sale weblog.
Edgeio is a new service to create classifieds directly from your weblog. It automatically organizes entries tagged with listing on the Edgeio site, and allows visitors to search and comment on listings. The concept sounds very interesting to me, so I decided to try it out.
The only thing I have for sale at the moment are web server accounts, so I created three posts on the BryteNet blog describing the three web hosting packages BryteNet currently offers. I tagged all posts with the keyword listing as well as some additional keywords. After that I signed up at Edgeio, claimed my blog and noticed that the posts were already appearing on the site, including a thumbnail made from the image I used in the post. Though they offer the possibility to encode the list price in the blog post as well, I had not mentioned the price, so I edited my Edgeio entries to list the corresponding price. Conclusion: it is very easy to get listed on Edgeio.
After that I went to the customer side of Edgeio, to see how my listings would appear. One great feature of Edgeio is that you can enter your location, and it will filter the listings based on the distance you have chosen with an AJAX slider. I started by putting the slider on 'Lleida' to see only listings from my home town. As expected ---there are only a handful of bloggers here--- only my own listings showed up.
I moved the slider up to 'Catalonia'. To my surprise, I found that only one other Catalan blogger uses Edgeio, offering jobs in Barcelona. There are quite some bloggers in Catalonia, but apparently none of them has found Edgeio yet. I continued to 'Spain' finding three more offers, bringing the total on an amazing eight!
It is clear that Edgeio is not ready for prime time yet. Though it is easy to get listed, not many bloggers use the service, and therefore it is not worth the effort at this moment to search for listings on Edgeio.
