eBay dumps Blogs

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eBay has announced that eBay Blogs are being retired at the end of next month:

While eBay Blogs provided useful and interesting information, we have decided to focus our efforts on what matters most to our members: making eBay the best place to buy and sell on the Web.

First let me say that, despite some panicky comments on Auctionbytes, this relates to blogs hosted *on* eBay, not to blogs *about* eBay. Ina’s not going anywhere and neither are we. 😆

But the news isn’t altogether surprising. There was a time a couple of years back when eBay seemed about to embrace the social internet. They implemented not only blogs, but My World, eBay ToGo and a whole range of widgets that promised to put eBay listings on every other site on the net.

The problem was that this was never quite integrated with the rest of eBay’s site. Blogs remained stuck in a backwater that only the initiated could ever find. My World never fulfilled its promise to match MySpace or Facebook. The eBay Wiki came and went, largely unnoticed. Widgets were slow to get integrated with the eBay affiliate program and were a victim of growing seller disillusionment: who wants to promote eBay when you can promote your own website.

And eBay’s management never quite got blogs. They made ridiculous rules about no outside linking – rules that were as disregarded as they were pointless. They didn’t offer the most basic features – a blogroll, for example, or exporting, on which more below. The lack of integration with eBay Shops/Stores or any other part of the selling platform kept the Blogs community tiny and isolated, rather than the fantastic promotional tool it could have been for both eBay sellers and eBay themselves.

I was hoping here to be able to suggest a way of preserving your blog posts if you want to keep them on the internet – eBay’s suggestion to “print out or save your blog entries” seeming to miss the point rather. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to offer any kind of export facility. The RSS feed will allow you to import your last ten entries into something else, but that’s all. The Google Reader API should let you grab up to 999 entries, but eBay’s URLs don’t seem to work with that. So if you’ve got a couple of years’ worth of posts you want to preserve, cutting and pasting is looking like your only option. If anyone has any better ideas, please leave us a comment.

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