eBay wants to develop new software tools that will allow it to cash in on the increasing popularity of blogging, a senior executive told the Financial Times, according to a report on the newspaper’s Web site Tuesday.
“Our approach would be to develop new tools that we can turn over to bloggers, so they can define the natural shape of the market place on their own, that is how eBay originally developed,” Doug McCallum, eBay’s U.K. managing director, told the FT in an interview.
However, while eBay’s plans are still in the early stages, another company, MeCommerce, is in the process of launching similar software that lets bloggers insert product listings within their blogs and keep 50% of the profits from sales, the FT reported.
MeCommerce co-founder Yobie Benjamin explained that the 50% revenue split was part of the start-up’s “ethical commitment to empowering people” to develop micro-businesses.
Benjamin went on to say that “eBay can’t (launch a service like) this because they don’t have the inventory.”
The prototype of MeCommerce’s service has received rave reviews from bloggers, according to the FT report.

Posted: 07|5|06 at 7:19 am. Filed under: UK News.