eBay blogs which I thought would take a little longer to materialize are now live. It’s not a beta test or private invite deal if you have an eBay account then that’s all you need to create your eBay blog.

The process of creating your own blog is:

1) login to your eBay account
2) name your blog — don’t worry you can go to “settings” and edit the name later.
3) start posting — either as a draft or publish immediately after writing.

comments - the blog has comments enabled by default and in order to leave a comment the person must have an eBay account. This should cut down on spam unless the spammers have a lot of throwaway eBay accounts. My guess is many won’t bother.

RSS - An RSS 2.0 feed is provided. Our test blog didn’t validate using Feed Validator returning two errors:

#line 27, column 37: Image link doesn’t match channel link [help]

< ![CDATA[http://www.ebay.com]]>

#line 46, column 0: item should contain a guid element [help]

templates - an advanced option allows for a custom stylesheet or there are seven templates to choose from: orange (default), modern, slate, sunshine, classic, ocean and strawberry.

settings - options include: blog name, description, tags (up to 10), number of recent posts to display on your blog home page (1, 3, 5 — default, 7, 10 or all for the current posts), show or hide comments, allow comments on new posts and the ability to add a custom RSS footer (default is: “You can get it on eBay.”)

More thoughts
Images - doesn’t seem to be any way to upload images, so you’ll need to use third party image hosting services. This isn’t a huge deal as places like imageshack, photobucket, Flickr or your own hosting will fill this void.

Search - is it only for eBay auction items? I tried searching for specific keywords in the test post and nothing was returned. A search across blog entries doesn’t appear to be available yet.

Ads - none displayed yet. No way to customize or add any sort of affiliate revenue outside of in the post body. My guess is that when eBay AdContext launches there will be a way to add this to your eBay blog, but I wouldn’t count on the ability to add any third party ads unless you do it in your post which might be against their TOS. From my interpretation, but keep in mind I’m no lawyer, this wouldn’t be allowed. They have specific verbiage forbidding “linking” to items for sale that aren’t on eBay.

podcasts/vlogs? - didn’t test. Might be worthwhile to try and link up say an embedded YouTube video and see if it works. I’ll report if/when I test this out. Or you can try it out and let me know in the comments. I’m curious on the podcast front if you link to an MP3 file if it will create the necessary RSS enclosure.

Clearly these blogs are meant to be used as tools for eBay sellers, or buyers perhaps blogging their experience (about eBay). Good for eBay, but for any sort of non-eBay blogging probably a bit too restrictive. Check out the community content policy for details about what isn’t allowed — and what is. You can use profanity, but no vulgar language.

Talked with my wife and we are going to use as eBay probably intends (just a guess on my part): as a tool for our eBay auctions both current, past and potentially in the future. Could be a nice way for people bidding on your auctions to get additional information and backstory.

Overall, as an eBayer since 2002, I like the fact they added the option to have these blogs. I’d like to be able to add the eBay AdContext when it arrives. When I mentioned AdContext a person named Ken stopped by in the comments to say he was an eBay product manager and that: “AdContext will not cost sellers anything extra. All sellers will have their listings eligible for display in the ad units automatically. If a person clicks through on a listing in an ad unit and ends up winning or buying the item there is no additional cost to the seller.”

Who is going to be paying?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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