craigslist blog

There’s a new trailer up for Season 2 of craigslist TV — Superheros Unite!

Superman has more background on this story.

Enterprising CL user Steven Ortiz has reportedly traded his way up from an old cell phone to a porsche in Glendora, CA.

Not bad, although fellow barterer Kyle MacDonald traded up from a red paper clip to a house in Saskatchewan in 2008.

Hmmm, wonder what I could get for 10 tea bags of rich, robust Guayaki fair trade Yerba Maté?

Stanley Park Sea Wall is for sale — no reasonable offers refused.

Free salmonberries included if you act now.

Get a jump on global warming!

Here are the top 5 search providers, as ranked by Comscore for March 2010. Just for fun I’ve added % growth since January 2009, when Jeremy Zawodny (formerly at Yahoo) replaced craigslist’s old search architecture:

Wonder how CL would rank if we were actually in the search business?

In regard to the responses his ad has generated so far, he resists breaking down percentages by serious inquiries versus goofs. “That’s a judgment call, right?” he asks, laughing. But he’s been impressed with the quality of quite a few contacts — although, thus far, the best of the batch are folks who weren’t listed as independents prior to the aforementioned deadline. “They’ll say, ‘I’m registered as a Republican, but I’ll switch,’” he allows. “And unfortunately, that won’t work.”

However, he’s got around fifteen new submissions he hasn’t had a chance to examine thus far, giving him confidence that he’ll find a worthy running mate by his planned announcement press conference, slated for 5 p.m. Friday, May 28

http://www.csindy.com/IndyBlog/archives/2010/05/11/candidate-seeks-running-mate-on-craigslist

http://blogs.westword.com/latestword/2010/05/craigslist_ad_want_to_run_for.php

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/10/jason-clark-colorado-gube_n_570040.html

True to form, CT AG Blumenthal is once again indulging in self-serving publicity at the expense of the truth and his constituents — touting a subpoena on television and telling whoppers about craigslist “reneging” on promises — even before craigslist had been served with a subpoena.

As AG Blumenthal knows full well, craigslist has gone beyond fulfilling its legal obligations, far beyond classifieds industry norms, has more than lived up to any promises it made, and working together with its partners is in fact a leader in the fight against human trafficking and exploitation.

With his senatorial race in full swing however, AG Blumenthal won’t let the facts get in the way of a good photo op. Or as I heard while in his offices 2 years ago — “The most dangerous place on earth is getting caught between Dick Blumenthal and a television camera.”

There is a “campaign” on twitter currently demanding that all of craigslist personals be shut down.

If you follow links supplied by the twitterers echoing this demand, you’ll find a couple of themes:

1. They recognize that “declassifying” adult services ads would simply push them back into the personals categories, therefore you need to eliminate all personals.
2. They believe casual sex, and sex outside of marriage, is happening in CL personals. Such sex is evil. Therefore CL personals are evil. Shut down CL personals.

This twitter campaign echos reasoning we have previously heard from Attorneys General, at least one of whom also essentially demanded that all of craigslist personals be shut down.

As reported in Wired, craigslist personals are the most used personals site in the US, dwarfing the total combined usage of match.com and eharmony.com and yahoo personals. CL personals are highly valued by craigslist users (and by the general public) who use them to find friendship, love, romance, companionship, entertainment, and yes, “casual encounters.”

The twitterers do have a point - declassifying “adult services” on a free classifieds board likely necessitates removing all personals categories (and probably services categories as well). Some of them point to eBay’s kijiji.com, kijiji.ca, and gumtree.com sites, which recently eliminated all personals categories, as a model to be followed in this regard.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and we embrace all criticism as useful in improving our approach. But cynical misuse of a cause as important as human trafficking as a pretense for imposing one’s own flavor of religious morality (”casual sex is evil”) strikes me as wrong on so many levels.

We will continue to work with our partners in law enforcement and advocacy groups, and reach out to potential new ones, as we strive to do the best job we can in combating human trafficking, while preserving the full-fledged classifieds (complete with all of the free personals categories) that CL users (and the general public) want and deserve.

Original CL ad is viewable here. Will go quickly, but would be purchasers note that “Buyer must honor Barry Manilow booking next Thursday”