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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

Craigslist spreads to Bloomington

It was long the province of major cities like San Francisco, Boston and Seattle.\nBut Bloomington acquired the online community bulletin board Craigslist last week. The international cultural phenomenon, which traffics more than 4 billion page views per month, added 100 new markets ranging from Budapest to Bangladesh, from Flagstaff, Ariz. to Fayetteville, Ark.\nBloomington made the cut in the latest round of expansion because of "numerous user requests, quite of few of which came from IU students," Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster said.\nA free online classified site, craigslist.org serves as a one-stop emporium for everything from sublets to used mountain bikes to concert tickets. Testimonials abound of entire apartments furnished for a song, of barters struck for guitar lessons or massages. Bloomingtonians are already hawking kayaks, a Mortal Kombat II arcade machine and a 12-by-11 inch ceramic bust of the Dalai Lama with bronze acrylic finish. A Scrabble deluxe edition is being sold for $15.\nCraigslist also promises more companionship than new roommates would provide. It of course includes a personals section featuring the popular pretense-free "Casual Encounters" and "Missed Connections," in which posters hope to locate objects of desire they encountered in social settings or chanced to see on the street.\nIntended as a digital commons, it's also known for its raucous message board "Rants and Raves," a seat of sociological commentary and heated and often profane political debate. In most markets, it usually degenerates quickly into back-and-forth insults hurled anonymously through cyberspace. Recent Bloomington posts have concerned "neotard locksteppers" and "Ann Coulter's adam's apple." Recent discussions have addressed the American public's disinterest in soccer and the likelihood of restaurant wait staff retaliating against stingy tippers.\nManagement prides Craigslist on being non-commercial, an oasis in an increasingly corporate Internet. The interface is basic, the design serviceable, devoid of any frills. It runs no advertising, no banners, no pop-ups, no sidebars, no scroll-overs.\nFounder Craig Newmark never intended it as a money-making enterprise. In the Internet's Paleolithic era, the self-avowedly "geeky" computer programmer e-mailed San Francisco-area friends about job openings, housing leads, parties and technology updates. Before long, the e-mails circulated into wide distribution. He switched over to a listserv and soon realized a Web site would be needed to accommodate the volume.\nPeople flocked to the site, which was quickly considered the Bay Area's premiere job resource for techies. It took root in other forward-leaning cities like Austin, Texas and Portland, Ore., and has since spread concentrically across the globe. Noting its 10 million individual users per month, market tracker Alexa places Craigslist as the seventh most visited site on the Web, trailing only Yahoo, Google, MySpace, Microsoft Network, eBay and Amazon.\nCraigslist remains true to its humble origins. It's run out of a restored Victorian home in San Francisco's Sunlight District with a staff of 22.\nManagement has declined to leverage its position into maximizing profits. It charges below-market fees for apartment listings in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City, which are free to users everywhere else. A recent Wall Street Journal analysis puts its annual earnings at $25 million with a potential worth in the hundreds of millions.\nSimilarly providing a free service to users, Google rakes in revenues hand over fist from advertisers. A Wall Street darling, Google has seen its market valuation skyrocket up to $390 per share since it went public last year. Craigslist focuses instead on providing a public service, Buckmaster said.\nFor all its idealism, Craigslist does not lack detractors. Many consider it a threat to the newspaper industry, as it siphons away classified dollars. IU Director of Student Media David Adams, downplays the local impact.\n"It's been available in Indianapolis for some time, and it seems to meet the needs of some clients, but not all," he said. "Certainly, a free service delivered electronically is a potential challenge to the IDS and other traditional forms of media delivery of such advertising messages."\nMany predict Craigslist and similar sites will force newspapers to tinker with their business model, which depends on advertising, particularly classifieds. The IDS is already mindful of the threat, Adams said.\n"I think newspapers and all other media will continue to adapt and change to new, Internet-based revenue challenges," he said. "I think the IDS is unique because it primarily serves a defined population gathered together as a unique university community.\n"We have worked aggressively to have our own searchable classifieds and other advertising directories and vehicles, so I think we'll meet such challenges."\nOverlapping the services of locally established networking sites like Facebook, only time will tell whether Craigslist will click in Bloomington. But after only a week with no publicity, http://bloomington.craigslist.org/ has more than 300 posts.

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