Few people have a grasp on Web 2.0 as Mike Arrington (of TechCrunch fame) does. His development of Edgeio has honestly opened my eyes to what the term is truly about and it took Pete Cashmore’s look at Edgeio for me to realize this.

Edgeio is best described as eBay with a twist - rather than going to Edgeio’s website and placing your classified, you simply post it on your blog and Edgeio will find it and display it for you. Is this a foreshadowing of what is to come, will blogs be the gateway to not only producing but also receiving content in the future? In 20 years, could you really only interface with thousands of companies through your blog alone?

When the Internet was first developed, no one would have predicted images, games, and even programs would be distributed over the network. When the World Wide Web was finalized, commercialization was expressly forbidden. Ten years ago it took months, even years, of practice and self-teaching to develop a website worth visiting. Today, I can have a domain name, host, and blog with content within the hour. Is it really so outlandish to believe that a blog will soon become a standard portion of your grandmother’s ISP package, and in the years to come it will become the Internet’s command line?

Within the 15 minutes since I read Pete Cashmore’s post (and it all made sense to me) I have thought of the following uses:

Travel
“I need 1 ticket from King Salmon, AK, to Atlanta, GA, then on to Tallahassee, FL, the next day. I also need 1 ticket from Baltimore, MD, to Atlanta, GA, then on to Tallahassee, FL, the next day. Both flight should land within 3 hours of one another in Atlanta, GA, and we would like to share a hotel room.”

I post that to my blog, tag it appropriately, and an aggregator finds it and begins contacting travel agencies. Within a few hours I’m given my options and prices, via trackbacks, which I notice quickly thanks to an RSS feed.

Gifts
“I need 2 dozen red roses delivered to my house for my wife, between the hours of 1PM and 5PM on Valentine’s Day. My Google Wallet ID is XXX, please bill me.”

I post that to my blog, tag it appropriately, and an aggregator finds it, contacts a local florist and places my order. When the flowers are delivered I am notified via a trackback and a bill is waiting for me.

I could continue with more examples, but it’s quite clear where I am going with this. Of course, the examples I state above would require a nice staff of humans watching the aggregator (or very developed human language software). I would be interested in learning how Edgeio approaches the human language barrier - is there a specific syntax in which a listing must be formatted?

What are your thoughts on the blog as the Internet’s command line? Can you think of any further uses? Feel free to share! Also, check out Edgeio’s Blog and Mashable! Thanks to Mike and Pete, for inadvertedly opening my eyes to the greatness ahead.