BlogBuy, another player in the blog-classifieds model

BlogBuy launched yesterday. It’s a way for people to post classified ads via their blogs. A user posts an item for sale on the BlogBuy site and the ad automatically gets published on his or her blog.

BlogBuy supports hListing, a proposed microformat that standardizes the way classified ads appear on the web so that they can be more easily discovered and indexed by search engines and crawlers. Michael Edwards, BlogBuy’s founder, discusses the launch here.

We asked Edwards if he envisioned BlogBuy being a place that aggregates all the classified ads listed on blogs. His answer:

However, we don’t want to be an aggregator like Oodle is. Oodle seems to be doing a pretty good job at what they do and we plan on offering them a file that they can download and parse that contains every item in our database. I don’t want to be in the business of competing with them though because it means we would be competing against Technorati, Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search.

We are strictly focused on helping people buy and sell on blogs based on items that sellers list on our site. We provide features that allow buyers and sellers to management the transaction workflow (ie, you need to pay, now you need to ship, etc). We fully support and encourage people to conduct transactions off site through email or other means and we don’t charge people any transaction fees for conducting the transaction through our site. I don’t believe anyone will ‘own’ the market for all these transactions. In fact I think it is a little silly for anyone to think that they are going to have every commerce transaction go through their site. That’s one of the reasons for creating the site in the first place — how are we supposed to move past where ecommerce is now to a time where everything is digital if people still can’t “own” their own reputations?

Edwards says the business model will be contextal ads for now. “We don’t plan to charge transaction fees or listing fees,” he said, ”the two main revenue streams of eBay. We do have other ideas but they involve parts of the site that are not yet up.”

Edwards’ company is Corestrategy, Inc., based in Athens, GA. It’s been funded to this point by friends and family, though Edwards says he “now at the stage where we will be seeking to raise an angel round.” Prior to this, Edwards was a founder and CEO of Mediachest, a peer-to-peer movie site like Peerflix.

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because another company just launched in this space.