Online auctioneer eBay is moving aggressively to shore up its leading market position by reducing the risk of becoming too reliant on Google's dominant search share. Recently, eBay has negotiated large deals such as the integration of its PayPal unit's service into Yahoo!. Also, eBay announced its intention to distribute auction listings to third-party Web sites through a new program called AdContext.

The emergence of eBay as a direct alternative for monetizing your traffic is being under estimated. Both for the implications for Google as well as for publishers. I am looking forward to seeing some of the early results so we can see what might happen here. It certainly opens up opportunities for better monetization at Oodle and Topix

In terms of ratings there is alot going on out there, ranging from efforts like ours or Insider Pages where the focus is to create lots of consumer generated content to Rapleaf which is trying to create a seller rating system that can be user on Craig’s List etc.