Auction giant eBay is preparing to integrate blog and wiki publishing tools into its selling platform, according to a report on Auctionbytes. eBay Blogs will enable sellers to more efficiently market their products. eBay Wikis meanwhile collect fact-based articles written and maintained by eBay Community members. Both tools will be launched at the eBay Live conference in Las Vegas June 13 - 15.
Working off the Auctionbytes story, I dug a little deeper and found more details including a tag/search platform. The eBay Blog help pages here and the wiki information pages here. In addition, as you can see from the screenshot below and the links on the help pages, Skype integration is coming soon too.
eBay Blogs can be used for a variety of purposes including to enhance a store, to share personal experiences or simply to talk about collectibles. The blogs are free and all blogs will reside at the blogs.ebay.com URL. Each individual blog will live at http://blogs.ebay.com/userID
Each eBay Blog will have something called Search Tags. These are keywords that the publisher can use to identify the topics and concepts that are unique to them. These search tags will give each blog a high placement on related searches. So if an eBay seller uses tags like "Pez", "dispensers" and "collectibles" they can increase their visibility in search results. All blogs will also support RSS.
By launching blogs and wikis, eBay is taking a big step to push into the social commerce arena. Conversation drives commerce so integrating blogs, wikis and tags into the eBay toolkit is a natural extension to their core platform, which has long included discussion boards. I would not be surprised to see the company take this a step further and build eBay into a giant social network that lets like-minded buyers and sellers find each other.
eBay's love for blogging doesn't stop there. It has also converted its newsletter into a TypePad-powered blog. Given this I bet TypePad/6A will be the back-end provider for eBay's blogs. A developer's wiki is already live.
Technorati Tags: eBay, eBay Blogs, eBay Wikis, Skype, Social Commerce








