E-business Briefing from E-consultancy features insight and opinions from top e-business consultants, CEOs and senior management on the issues they are facing as well as selected e-business white papers.
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| E-business Briefing: Interview with Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist | ||||
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In this issue: 1. Interview with Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist 2. Other stories of note in the past week 3. NEW REPORT: Online Ad Networks - a Buyer's Guide 4. JOBS: Latest jobs on E-consultancy 5. Top forum post: Nasty tricks that can affect your SEO effort 6. Top forum post: 'Bobby' does not equal 'accessible' |
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| 1. Interview with Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist | ||||||
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Craig Newmark is a senior Web-oriented software engineer, with around twenty-five years of experience (including 18 years at IBM), and has become a leader in online community by virtue of running www.craigslist.org for over 9 years. He's compiled extensive experience evangelizing, leading and building, including work at Bank of America and Charles Schwab. In 1995, he started craigslist which serves as a non-commercial community bulletin board with classifieds and discussion forums. Using a common sense, down-to-earth approach, craigslist strives to make the 'net more personal and authentic, while advocating social responsibility through the promotion of small, non-profit organizations. E-consultancy: You've described Craiglist as a happy accident. Tell us how it all started and when did you decide to turn pro, as it were? Craig Newmark: In '94 I was at Charles Schwab, evangelizing the 'net for the brokerage business, and saw a lot of people helping others out. Early '95, I figured I should do something like that, so I started a simple email list telling people about arts/technology events. It spread through word of mouth; people wanted more, so I did it. They called it craigslist, but when I had to give it a name, I thought "sf-events", but smarter people than me told me to call it craigslist... since that signified it would stay personal and quirky. They were right. When did you realise it had become a big deal? How did you cope with scale? Is it a big deal? I coped with scale by making Jim Buckmaster my CEO. My title and actual work is 'customer service rep and founder'.
How many times have you told those pesky venture capitalists to take a walk? And are you still being pestered by potential investors? And do you plan to cash in at any point? No. How has it been with eBay, since they acquired a stake via one of your former colleagues?
The news is that there's no news. We're pleased to have eBay as a shareholder. Do you have any plans to introduce advertising on the site? Nope, but people have told us in some numbers that it'd probably be okay. On the other hand, no one is asking as to run ads on the site. Craigslist all started out by word of mouth didn't it? That must be quite rewarding, to have created a resource that is highly recommended by users? That's right on both counts. What's most rewarding is the culture of trust we have, just by following our moral compass, pretty much the same for the community we help. How important is Google / Yahoo to your business? We feature maps from Google and Yahoo, and both rank our pages highly in their search results. Am I right in thinking you don't advertise or do any serious PR? Nothing real serious and no, we've never done any advertising. Susan Mactavish Best of Best PR helps mostly by helping prevent me from saying anything stupid. She's had a lot to do with the quality and quantity of press we've had this year. How many page impressions are you pulling in? Can you reveal any web metrics? Right now we're generating about 2.5 billion page views per month and maybe 8 million unique visitors, who contribute around 6 million posts per month, including forums. Craigslist is expanding all over the world. What do you look for in a new territory? Mostly, people ask us to start up a craigslist in their city, making us feel welcome. You maintain your own blog and seem to be a real enthusiast for citizen journalism / blogging. What are your favourite sites and where do you think all this is going? I have a bunch, including wonkette, Dan Gillmor / bayosphere, Jeff Jarvis / buzzmachine. I think the whole news industry is changing deeply; one big concern is to preserve existing newsrooms and the jobs therein. Any advice to help enlighten the next generation of internet entrepreneurs / technology developers? Be serious about customer service. What's on the Craigslist iPod? Leonard Cohen, Sophie B Hawkins, Kinky Friedman, Tori Amos, Sarah MacLachlan, Fiona Apple, Warren Zevon. Craig was interviewed by Chris Lake, editor, E-consultancy. Questions, comments, concerns? Head over to our forum to discuss this interview or any other e-business / internet marketing subject. |
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| 2. Other stories of note in the past week | ||||||
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Seven joyous stories for your brain to absorb:
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| 3. NEW REPORT: Online Ad Networks - a Buyer's Guide | ||||||
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It's here - the first known buyer's guide to advertising via online ad networks, which can help advertisers increase reach while reducing CPM spend. At 103 pages it includes 13 in-depth vendor profiles, market research / growth forecasts and a SWOT analysis. A must-read for publishers & advertisers.
View White Paper / Report » |
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| 5. Top forum post: Nasty tricks that can affect your SEO effort | ||||||
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Hurricane Agency's Matthew Browne reminds people about the importance of implementing your domain names correctly to avoid Google's duplicate content features. Includes a link to a useful post on Threadwatch will a list of tips, tricks and fixes.
View Forum Message » |
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| 6. Top forum post: 'Bobby' does not equal 'accessible' | ||||||
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Segala M Test's Paul Walsh points out the flaws in Bobby, the free accessibility tool, and urges site owners and agencies not to rely on it as a means of ensuring compliance. Bobby is a helpful pointer, not a foolproof wondercure for inaccessible websites. Be careful out there...
View Forum Message » |
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| 7. E-consultancy - why join the UK's best e-business network? | ||||||
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>> Upgrade now for access to all the above |
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