Craigslist is about:
- giving each other a break, getting the
word out about everyday, real-world stuff.
- restoring the human voice to the
Internet, in a humane, non-commercial environment.
- keeping things simple, common-sense,
down-to-earth, honest, very real.
- providing an alternative to impersonal,
big-media sites.
- being inclusive, giving a voice to the
disenfranchised, democratizing ...
- being a collection of communities with
similar spirit, not a single monolithic entity.
a little history:
Craig Newmark observed people on the Net,
on the WELL and in Usenet, helping one another out. In early
'95, he decided to help out, in a very small way, telling people
about cool events around San Francisco like the Anon Salon and
Joe's Digital Diner. It spread through word of mouth, and became
large enough to demand the use of a list server, majordomo,
which required a name.
Craig wanted to call it "sf-events", but
more knowledgeable friends suggested calling it "craigslist" to
reinforce its personal and down-to-earth nature. He still finds
it awkward that such a visible site is named after him, but
he'll get over it.
Over time, people started posting items on
the list in different areas, jobs, stuff for sale, and
apartments, the latter in response to San Francisco's apartment
shortage. Craig wrote software which could automatically add
email postings to a site which became www.craigslist.org.
After being approached toward the end of
'97 about running banner ads, he decided to make craigslist
non-commercial. Some things should be about money, some
shouldn't, and I make enough doing contract programming." He was
joined by other folks who proposed running face-to-face parties
to make the sense of virtual community more physical, and who
proposed creating a nonprofit foundation as part of craigslist.
Craig devoted himself full-time to
craigslist in early 1999.
A lot of HR people and recruiters tell us
that craigslist is the most effective job site in the San
Francisco Bay Area... and now a February 2000 Forrester report
confirms this.
Link
Craigslist
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