the Kool Aid is getting stronger!

"Craigslist is *totally free* to use (...) you will find *every minute* spent on this site to be useful and beneficial"[my emphasis] (why hire flacks when you can get your clueless "friends" to say all the bullshit...) D.

let the Kool Aid rule...

MORE: where is all this going? (at this rate, the profits are going to reach billion level -- what is Craig going to tell people then? "the trillionaire life is really lousy... *we* wouldn't do that, now... would we?" yes, you would... ) D.

"He doesn't believe in making more than a small profit..." -- yeah, that's why he keeps adding a fee for posting jobs in more and more cities at the point when they hit critical mass... (and refuses to spend money on customer service and improvements...) D.

"Keeping Score In The Money Race..."

now, that sounds like the kind of thing Craig should be involved in... -- maybe if he is on the board for such things, nobody is going to wonder where are those craigslist profits going... and what's with all his empty talk...D.

craigslist foundation PR: all the spin that's fit to print

Craig hires another flack... Liane? what... Susan wasn't bulshitting enough? "there is more to craigslist than meets the eye" -- you have no idea, Liane... you have *no* idea... D.

child prostitution: plenty of profits...

MORE: and ...wouldn't you know it, Craig is back at it! congratulating himself... (who cares that he is personally doing "customer service"? he seems to be pretty clueless most of the time and how is that supposed to solve anything...? he should be getting competent people instead, enough of them and pay them well so the problems can be solved -- he comes across like either a monumental idiot or a fast talking crook...) D.

...As I was telling Seth... I am tired of this topic.... but good God! why won't craigslist spend some of those humongous profits to address its child prostitution problem? So what if it's not illegal ( last paragraph) to have such ads on the site? it *should* be! what's wrong with these people who defend it? how could it help to provide an efficient way of doing such things? once in a while the police catches a couple of cases... but that's got to be minute compared with the increase in child prostitution cases due to the ease provided by craigslist...

Delia

where are you, Charlie Rose...

oh... what a credulous interviewer... he did ask occasional good questions (e.g. the upcoming fee for Chicago) but he's taking Craig's answers as gospel -- where are you Charlie Rose...

Delia

P.S. left a suggestion...

Hi Michael!

If you haven't done that already, I think you may benefit from watching Charlie Rose interview Craig...(it's on Google video)

Delia

P. S. take care! D.

(Valleywag) Megan nailed it...

re: "Newmark's tendency to bloviate endlessly, baselessly, and tediously..." D.

(looks like) Craig planned an accident...

Craig: "craigslist is a company, well... let's say accident"...(3.20)

let's see... Craig registered a commercial website on his own name "cnewmark.com" as "Newmark Enterprises" but he didn't plan it... it was just an accident... (how much more ridicuous can he get?)

Delia

P.S. notice his ambiguity again...

Craig is a marketer...

alright ... just like he's an entrepreneur (as much as he would like people to believe otherwise...) D.

(Associated Press is even MORE clueless) oh, Lisa? how about...

UPDATE: bye bye Contra Costa Times (they make people register to view the stuff -- how annoying...) -- hello insidebayarea.com!
.....
some basic research? re: "Founder Craig Newmark could not confirm whether the power outage disabled the world's seventh-largest English language Web site" D.

another "pro" publication that doesn't seem to be worth much...

MORE: they also removed my comment after they had posted it -- what's the word?:)... (starts with a "p"...)
...
... as far as getting accurate info about craigslist goes... (reminds me of webpronews) D.

If you say so, Jim...("the masses" = Craig&Jim; "decent living"= untold millions...)

Keith McArthur, The Globe and Mail update: "The former hippie from Ann Arbor, Mich., says he's even come to accept that capitalism is the best way to "organize societal resources" to provide the masses with a decent living" (2nd paragraph)

Delia

P.S. keep in mind that non-profits can provide people (including the owners) with a decent living (normal salaries and benefits), the difference is that the owners don't get to pocket the profits... D.

craigslist went down even before...

MORE
.....
... serious competition showed up...

Hi! (to whoever is writing this -- it wasn't apparent)

well, craigslist used to be #7, no? so it's been going down even prior to Kijiji taking on their turf...or Facebook taking about being a marketplace themselves...

Delia

(in the past 3 mo) craigslist views per user increased by 5%... *why*?

according to Alexa -- is this a result of banning Listpic? (people have to spend a lot more time looking at a lot more pages in order to find what interests them and might even give up early) D.

Craig: Charlie asked tough questions...

well, it's good Craig acknowledges this (answer to second question) -- it's just that plenty of Charlie's good questions, such as those about ownership and profits had been asked before... it was just that Craig never answered them... so... Charlie's real merit was getting Craig to answer...

Delia

P.S. makes you wonder why would Craig answer only when Charlie asked these questions but not others... D.

whatever happned with Sellius? (did Craig throw them a bone?)

MORE: oh, the sound of sucking up...
......
sort of looks like it -- they had some pretty good questions back a while...

Delia

P.S. a bit of attention from Craig, and they seem to have forgotten all about it... D.

nothing (necessarily) wrong with charging -- pocketing the money is the problem...

re: Craig (about charging money for real estate ads): "It was simply a fix to a problem."
(end of third paragraph)

Delia

P.S. that "financial windfall" should have gone towards customer service and improvements instead of adding more millions for the shareholders... D.

will craigslist ban Wipbox?

it certainly appears to help users but does it technically violate craigslist's terms of use (agree not to:"u) use automated means, including spiders, robots, crawlers, data mining tools, or the like to download data from the Service - unless expressly permitted by craigslist") and will craigslist do anything about it?

Delia

P.S. Wipbox gets their ebay data through dataunion (which licenses the ebay content to them) but it appears that they do not have permission to use the craigslist data. D.

Is Craig a pimp?

some people think so... it all depends on whether he profits from all that prostitution going on on the site... Steven has unveiled that craigslist's "secret sauce" was sex related... but how much of those all important overall hits (which presumably bring advertisers to the paying sections) are really a result of prostitution? D.

another way to milk craigslist: what's Craig's salary?

may have been wrong when I said: "who cares?" he may indeed draw an unjustifiably large salary... (which would be another way to milk craigslist)

Delia

comic relief: "symbolic equity"

NetVet: "imagine someone said, symbolically, you can have 25% of my wife" D.

Owen's story

just so you don't get distracted by the last comments by Seth on Dan Gillmor's blog, here's a good summary of Owen's story (the opinion is a bit off, I'll explain later):

"My only point was to mention that they lied, outright lied, when they said they didn't benefit financially from the eBay transaction, and that they acted in poor character when they decided to malign the co-founded Phillip Knowlton, who did nothing to deserve this treatment. Phillip walked away with a lot of money, but he was also demonized, by people whom he had formerly trusted. And again, as was reported above, the only reason he sold was because he was being squeezed out." (comment by Valleygurl in Valleywag)

the thing is that, as I said on Dan Gillmor's blog... if we go by what Craig said on his blog, on the issue of having profited from the transaction, he didn't straight out lie... was he vague and ambiguous, which resulted in having even seasoned journalists believe he didn't profit financially? -- absolutely! and that's nothing new for Craig...(it seems to be his trademark -- he appears to be extremely good with ambiguity: things just "happen" to click in his interest, over and over and over... the chance that would just happen seems to be minute) ... that's another reason why I found Owen's story quite plausible...

however, on the issue of Phillip Knowlton's part in the affair, Vallygurl would be correct... craigslist was way more than just vague and ambiguous: it demonised somebody they temselves squeezed out, somebody that as a consequence had no choice but to sell...

and the real straight out lie seems to be the "symbolic ownership" (no dollar value) Craig talks about... which is at the crux of Craig's whole story (as we know today, craigslist was profitable at the time -- I don't think that was publicly known in 2004 when Craig told his story)

Delia

P.S. keep in mind that Owen's story does NOT come with proof attached (but then, neither does Craig's ...)

P.P.S. also, as far as I'm concerned, bringing to light the truth about things other publications got wrong is the redeeming value of tabloids such as Valleywag... D.