I've been a bit busy with the Holidays so I missed this news from a few days ago but I guess Mike Arrington backed Edgeio has gone out of business (I'm sure he's just thrilled that everyone is describing it like that but that's what everyone knows it as). 

For those who don't know, here's a brief description of Edgeio provided by Matthew Ingram...

Edgeio seemed like a good idea to me when it launched: A kind of distributed version of Craigslist, in which ads would be pulled from wherever they were — sitting on blogs or whatever, provided they had the right tags — and then aggregated at Edgeio’s site. But like Frederic at The Last Podcast, I never found much of value there, likely because not enough people decided to get on board and tag their posts properly.

Like Mr. Ingram I thought Edgeio was a good idea when I first heard of it but I was always surprised that they didn't seem to be supplementing the service with an internal classified site.  In other words, the service seemed to expect everyone to have their own blog and didn't offer any way for random people without a website or a blog to list items for sale. 

I kind of lost track of the company after its initial beta so I don't really know if they ever remedied that (though TechCrunch's job site was hosted on it so I assume they did).  I meant to keep tabs on it but I'm not one who usually sells his old stuff so it just sort of slipped through the cracks.

I still believe some kind of distributed system is the future of this industry.  I know for a fact that our HR department has to go to around 10 different sites when listing a job opening (not counting the various papers and professional publications).  If a company does have a web site where they list jobs it seems silly to not pull the data from there (which also makes changing things in the listing a lot easier).  But as a wise man once told me, sometimes the difference between a visionary and a failure boils down to nothing more than timing.  Edgeio's timing was obviously a little off.

On one last note I have to give props to Mr. Arrington for taking the comment-based-beating like a man when breaking the news on TechCrunch. If you're going to get raked over the coals you might as well have fun with it.