Blogs to Threaten Ecommerce Giants Like eBay?

Posted on May 17, 2005

Blogspotting has entry for BusinessWeek asking whether blogs could ultimately distrupt the business plans of Internet giants like eBay and Monster.com. The idea being that blogger communities and rss feeds might make it cheaper and easier for people to exchange products and services than posting an ad on eBay or Monster.

The idea, in brief, is that instead of being herded into walled gardens, such as eBay, the public will be able to use new structural and organizational tools to form into their own herds. People buying and selling, say, baseball cards, would simply find each other. EBay et al would no longer monopolize their users' data. Instead, they would have to build their business on providing services, such as payments and seller ratings.

Blogspotting.net's entry links to PubSub founder Bob Wyman's blog who explains the concept of structured blogging and how it could impact many businesses that probably felt comfortable with their business models only a year or two ago.The idea of blogs, rss and xml forcing these companies to change seems possible. However, blogs and rss feeds are still pretty disorganized and tagging alone is not likely to solve this problem. The Blogspotting entry also explains how AOL's "walled garden" approach was weakened by free email services and cheap Internet access. In a similar way, eBay and Monster are likely to see start-ups that make use of blogs and RSS to challenge them.

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