Today we’re launching a new product on Listia where sponsors can list a raffle to do their giveaway!  What’s the difference between our auctions and raffles?

• Anyone that enters the raffle has a chance to win
• Instead of placing bids you purchase raffle tickets using your Listia credits
• One winner will be chosen at random at the end of the raffle, the more tickets you have the higher your chances are of winning
• There are daily limits on the number of tickets you can buy based on your experience level, so check back every day!

Our first raffle is being hosted by our sponsor WePay and they’re giving away an XBOX 360 here!  Anyone can win with just 1 ticket!  Right now you can see raffles at the top of the site as well as on the right hand side of browse pages.  We’re working on integrating raffles into our search engine.  Good luck and have fun!

Run a business and want to sign up as a sponsor?

Ever want to do a giveaway, but want to reach beyond your own userbase?  Listia is a great solution for this!  Sponsored auctions and raffles get premium placement on the site and our users love seeing new products all the time!  Sponsored raffles allow anyone to win your item not just an experienced Listia user with a boatload of credits.  Expose your product to new users on Listia and send your existing customers to your raffle page … entering a raffle is easy as pie!

Want to learn more?  Our sponsored accounts are now self serve and you can learn more and sign up here.

For a limited time, you will receive bonus credits when you give away your Halloween costume on Listia!  Now that Halloween is over… make sure your costume is put to good use by giving it to someone who can use it next year.  While you’re at it, you might want to see if any costumes catch your eye too!  To get started, just visit the listing page for all the details…

Hope everyone had a great Halloween weekend!

Last night the team headed up to San Francisco’s Hub in SOMA for a talk and panel discussion featuring Rachel Botsman (@rachelbotsman), one of the authors of “What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise Of Collaborative Consumption”.  The basic idea is that there’s a new movement towards sharing, reusing, trading and renting instead of simply consuming.  The panel consisted of companies like Airbnb (rent out your room), Lending Club (lend money to other people and get higher returns) and Zimride (have an empty seat in your car?  carpool) who are all in favor of this movement.

Before arriving I didn’t really know what to expect from the planned 2 hour discussion, but the main idea was quickly demonstrated as I passed my wedding ring to the person on my right so she could hold onto it for the duration of the talk.  Rachel spoke about the different avenues within collaborative consumption and the one that hit home for us is swapping.  Listia is a great solution for people to get rid of stuff to someone who wants it and get something in return.  If you think about all the stuff you have in your home you’ll probably realize you don’t need a vast majority of the things you own.  Try it … go to a room in your house, do a full circle and count everything you haven’t touched in the last 3 months … you’ll be surprised.

10 years ago what would you do with all that stuff?  You might try to find a friend that needs it, give it to Goodwill, leave it on the curb with a sign that says “for free” or in the worst and probably most common case you end up throwing all that stuff away.  At Listia we’re trying to solve all of this by connecting you with someone that wants your stuff and at the same time giving you something in return.  Most importantly it helps people find a home for the stuff that would have ended up in the trash and in our landfills.  With that said I would like to personally thank our users for being a great part of this movement even if you don’t even realize it.  Consume less, share more.  Listia is really looking forward to see where this new movement is headed and we’re happy to be able to provide the service that we do for our users.

If this subject matter interests you feel free to check out collaborativeconsumption.com for more info.

Listia wants to make it easier and more rewarding to clean out your closets!  For a limited time, you’ll receive bonus credits when you list clothing, shoes or accessories to give away.  Those credits will definitely come in handy as the holidays approach, and you can even use them to bid on that cool jacket or handbag you always wanted.  Head on over to the listing page to get started!  (ends Oct. 22)

In other news, we also have a cool Halloween promotion going on right now.  If you are looking for a costume, check out the huge selection from our featured store here… you’ll receive 300 bonus credits just for completing any purchase over $10!  We also have a 10% coupon code and a free shipping deal to help you save even more.  All the details are here.  

photo via: rubbermaid

DVDs are great for trading on Listia… they can be watched over and over again, and nobody really cares if they are used! 

For a limited time, list some DVD movies or tv shows you no longer watch, and you’ll get a bunch of bonus credits.  Just be sure to add at least one photo and offer free shipping.  Most DVDs ship very cheaply via USPS media mail, so thats probably your best option. 

Can’t wait to see what movies everyone has!

photo via: andresrueda

The first person to correctly tell us what this is in the comments section of our blog (not facebook’s comments) will win a free Listia T-Shirt.

Have fun!

We are doing another Video Game promotion! For a limited time, list a video game to give away and you will receive bonus credits.  Just be sure to add a photo and offer free shipping.

Apple unveiled a ton of new products today, including new iPods and a new Apple TV! Since everyone here at Listia are big fans of anything Apple makes… we’ve decided to give away a bunch of these new products!  Check out our latest rewards auctions for brand new Apple TVs, an iPod nano and an iPod touch!

Thanks again to our awesome community for making Listia such a great place and good luck bidding on the Apple stuff!

Let us know what your favorite Apple products are and we will be sure to list more in the future 🙂

#86!  Not bad considering 50 sites are “undiscovered” (like us) and 50 sites are “classics” like Facebook, Twitter, Bing, Flickr, etc.  Thank you to all of our fantastic users for making things like this possible!

PCMAG.com – “The Top 100 Web Sites of 2010”

We’ve seen a few tickets requesting ways to filter search results.  Instead of making the search form more complicated by adding more fields we’ve enabled some advanced search features.  If you’re brave and want to use some of these feel free to give it a shot and let us know what you think.

“cat dog” means “cat AND dog” – This is the default mode and it will return auctions with both “cat” AND “dog”.

“cat | dog” means “cat OR dog” – This will return auctions with the words “cat” or “dog” in them.  That isn’t a capital “i” or a “one” … it should be the vertical bar on the same key as “”.

“reward !coke” or “reward -coke” means “reward AND NOT coke” – This is probably going to be the most useful for you guys based off the suggestions we’ve gotten.  This will return auctions with the word “reward” but will exclude auctions with the word “coke”.  When you use the “!” or “-” symbol you must have another search term (choosing a category doesn’t count).  This means searching for “!coke” is invalid.

“(cat dog) | bird” means “(cat AND dog) OR bird” – Parenthesis can be used to make complex queries.  The example given will return auctions with the words “cat” and “dog” or just the word “bird”.  Now for something a bit different, if you did “cat dog | bird” you might think it would be the same thing, but it actually translates to “cat and (dog or bird)”.  The OR actually has higher precedence than AND.

Confused yet?  Have fun!