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.
What works:
People tell us what they like about craigslist including:
- Giving people a voice
- A sense of trust and even intimacy
- Consistency of down-to-earth values
- Simplicity
- No charges, except for job postings
- Freshness of the material
- No ads, particularly no banner ads
