Plasma Tv Forum

My friend Fred wasn't looking for a saxophone case. But during his daily cruise of the For Sale Musical Instruments board on Craigslist, there it was: a baritone sax case, near-new, one-third off retail. Emails were exchanged; Fred met the owner in a parking lot, bought the case, and had a nice chat about saxophones.

My wife knits. She scans the Craigslist Arts Forum for advice about casting on and binding off and the other unfathomable stuff you do with yarn. It's advice you used to get from a great aunt, except that no one has great aunts around anymore--they're all off at Elderhostels. But everyone has Craigslist.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

www.craigslist.org: If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area--increasingly, if you live anywhere--you type that URL as easily as you type your own name. Craigslist is where you go to find a used bicycle or new girlfriend or, in one recent instance, to search--successfully--for a kidney donor. Craigslist is the brainchild of Craig Newmark. "I'm not all that smart," Newmark says, explaining how he created a service as essential as air. "But I am persistent. Or, if you prefer, stubborn."

The stubborn Newmark arrived in San Francisco in 1993 as a self-described New Jersey computer nerd. The Internet was a wave beginning to build. Newmark saw possibilities, ways for people to help other people. He launched an email list, spreading word of cultural happenings to a small circle of friends. The circle grew. The friends suggested he add other items to his list: jobs, apartments, used cars.

Today, Craigslist pops up on your computer screen displaying a universe of possibilities limned in clean blue type. Categories range from the cozy--that arts forum--to the more adventuresome: Casual Encounters. The list operates in 57 cities, Los Angeles to London, each month publishing 3 million new classified ads and 1 million community forum postings.

Naturally, with his list a triumph, Newmark now suits up in Dolce & Gabbana and operates his empire from a 30-story office tower. No. I made that up. Newmark is still rumpled and self-effacing, and Craigslist is still headquartered in a Victorian in San Francisco's Inner Sunset District. Despite recent changes--notably the acquisition of 25 percent of the company by auction giant eBay--the list still runs most postings free of charge.

The afternoon I visited, Newmark and his CEO, Jim Buckmaster, were toiling in a room that looked like the kind of garret where graduate students agonize over dissertations. As I asked questions, both men--but especially Newmark--were drawn inexorably back to their computer screens, monitoring their world. Newmark depends on Craigslist users to alert him to dubious online behavior. Is somebody who purports to be in Seattle but is really in Eastern Europe trying to sell a nonexistent plasma-screen TV? Newmark will attempt to identify and exile the offender.

"We have a culture of trust, of fairness," Newmark says, and he does his best to keep it that way--even though in this cynical world, some people believe that Craig Newmark is a mere marketing ploy, like the Jolly Green Giant or Mr. Peanut. Of the people who doubt he exists, he says: "I prefer to encourage them."

"There are a lot of ironies," Buckmaster says about Craigslist's success. "In the Internet boom days, people would ask us, 'Why aren't you going public?' We didn't want to. Well, a lot of the folks who put money first back then just melted away. And we're still here."

Yes. It is true: Sometime during the height of the Internet frenzy, there was a vague notion that along with making you fabulously rich, the Internet would alter your life in sleek and dangerous ways--that everyone would end up turning somersaults in cyberspace while wearing three-quarter-length leather jackets, just like Keanu Reeves. But as it turns out, that isn't what we want from the Internet. What we want, really, is a good deal on a saxophone case, or advice on yarn. We want a used sofa, a trustworthy plumber, someone to love. And as we search, we want someone watching over us, someone who truly hopes that each of us finds our heart's desire. Someone just like Craig.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Sunset Publishing Corp.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

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