Classifieds via blogs are the latest buzz. Others wrote already about edgio et al. ( namics blog, Bernhard Seefeld and Andreas Göldi (from december and in german, still interesting)), so I don't have to repeat it here.

While those services are not yet public and don't have to show much right now, I assume they won't be much more than focused aggregators (with some goodies of course). Edgeio for example said, that they look for the tag ā€œlistingā€ and aggregate those posts. So, if this takes off and kind of becomes a standard, it would be easy to piggyback on that for others, for example Planet Switzerland (search for tag/listing). Throw in the hListing microformat, some georeferencing and maybe some more commonly used tags and done is the classifieds aggregator for blogs.

As others pointed out discussing edgio, there's a big spam problem in this idea (for which I don't have a good solution either) and the usual chicken and egg problem. A big part of the blogger crowd doesn't care about tagging nor about microformats, so either you have to have a pretty smart aggregator, which recognizes blog-classifieds without those tags or you won't get much classifieds at all. Furthermore I don't know how many people would try to sell their stuff via blogs instead of going to ricardo or ebay with a much larger audience. On the other hand, the blog community, especially the swiss one, is something like a fenced garden, one knows each other and this makes it a lot easier and trusted to sell/buy/find something.

Maybe I'll extend Planet Switzerland some day with some more features into that direction (hListing parser for example and some georeferencing magic). Anyone interested at all?