Valleywag
sex trade
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Craigslist
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sex trade
In the "Wild West" of Craigslist's Erotic Services, does community policing prevail?
On the sex worker message board mypinkbook, escorts are working their nerves over some messy moderation on the Craigslist help forums. Like when one woman's ad got flagged for being "a little hookerish." Pot, kettle, black patent pumps, we know. The escort, DameKelly, shares the now-deleted Craigslist moderator response: More »
geek love
Valleywag fetishist seeks same on Craigslist
Our secret girl admirer writes, "The perfect, shared Sunday for me would consist of..." among other things, fighting over the Sunday Times and fondling iPhones. After an art flick, "[w]e could catch up on blogs like Valleywag and TechCrunch." Ooh, dreamy! As the only one on the masthead with a scant few degrees of sexual separation from both blogs' founding editors, I have some words of — well — we have not even begun to overshare. More »
craigslist
Would an in-house attorney keep Craigslist in line?
Hookers and eBay, shares and cops. If Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster, had an attorney on staff with them, would that have prevented questionable legal moves by the founder and CEO of the world's most reliable housemates and hookups platform? More »
hires
Jeremy Zawodny left Yahoo for Craigslist
While former Yahoo database engineer Jeremy Zawodny might prefer FriendFeed to Twitter, he'll be commuting to the offices of Craigslist from his home in San Jose. He was recruited via email by CTO Eric Scheide while still at Yahoo, and met with founder Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster before leaving Sunnyvale for the Inner Sunset. He'll help maintain and expand the company's ever-growing MySQL database. Because the last thing someone trying to sell a baby needs is for a PHP mysql_fetch_array() call to fail when posting their ad. (Photo by David Weekly)
sex trade
To end online prostitution, Chicago cops call for Craigslist boycott
In the biggest sting of its kind, Cook County police have made 76 Chicago-area arrests using Craigslist's Erotic Services section as their dragnet — the fourth such sting in an 18-month-long investigation. In an interview with CBS 2 Chicago, Sheriff Tom Dart accused Craigslist of operating "a free advertising network for prostitutes and pimps." More »
sex trade
Craigslist the "training wheels" of the online sex industry
"Free, popular and easy to use," says the Riverfront Times, Craigslist is "as close as America currently comes to the decriminalization of sex work." As part of an investigation into Internet prostitution, the St. Louis alt-weekly newspaper got on the same page with women in the trade who run client/escort message boards. Along with doing the usual decoding of acronyms (GFE, anyone?) and explaining what you get for $300 an hour, they got an earful from sex workers about where to get your start as an online escort. Valleywag readers won't need to even guess. More »
sex trade
Israel to jail online brothel owners in actual prisons
Good news for Second Life! Israeli legislator Zahava Gal-On has been so taken in by the illusion of sex offered in fake online worlds that she's proposing mandatory five-year jail terms for the operators of "virtual brothels" — websites "offering women for sale," she says. If only! Sites like Craigslist, The Eros Guide, MyRedBook, and The Erotic Review advertise real sex for hire, but law enforcers prefer to log on to track down working girls, rather than take the sites offline for pimping. If Gal-On took a moment to understand the economics of virtual vajayjay, she'd see her concerns were misplaced. More »
Bloggin' journos want to bring sexy back to classified ads
Steve Outing, a former editor at the Poynter Institute and self-described "new-media visionary" Christopher Ryan have started a blog to brainstorm ideas for new classified advertising business models. While quotes from the likes of new media pundit JD Lasica assert "Craig Newmark of Craigslist is not the devil incarnate," the level of obsession is evidenced in the site's popular categories. One cure for the classified ad revenue decline fever suggested? More Seesmic! [ReinventingClassifieds]
crime
Vancouver couple offers baby for sale on Craigslist
A Vancouver couple listed their week-old newborn for sale on Craigslist for $10,000, prompting a horrified user to call the police. When the cops arrived, they found the tyke breastfeeding and the parents claimed it was a hoax. Which didn't stop the authorities from confiscating the baby. Susan MacTavish Best issued the by-now boilerplate statement that reads "Misuse of Craigslist for illegal purposes is absolutely unacceptable to us." Those kooky Canadians just hate the free market. When they aren't unjustly subverting self-interest with their free health care, they're criminalizing the trade in human babies. Once Peter Thiel builds his Objectivist paradise at sea, expect him to make another fortune on PayBaby. (Photo by Badr Naseem)
craigslist
Jim Buckmaster's curious category system
It looked like an unassuming boast-post on the official Craigslist blog touting the site's fast page load times as computed by Alexa. But it's the post's category tags that caught my eye — Harassment and Philanthropy. Could be nothing, could be a subtle backhand to critics. You decide.
jim buckmaster
Craigslist CEO an expert time-waster
Jim Buckmaster, the suspiciously tall CEO of Craigslist, hates meetings. "I've always found them to be at best unproductive and boring, and at worst toxic and destructive," he tells FT Deutschland. "The people who want to show off do, the brown-nosers brown nose, everyone else wastes their time. I also think the larger the meeting, the worse it is." Buckmaster prefers to email or IM, even while in the same room as his electronic correspondents. When forced to attend a meeting, he finds ways to kill time: "Meetings are excellent for doodling. I can remember doing some really, really spectacular doodles." Doesn't this explain so much about how eBay's relationship with Craigslist soured?
sex trade
Craigslist safest place for teen prostitutes
British Columbia's child-welfare services have identified five women between the ages of 15 and 17 who used Craigslist to work as prostitutes. "There's an argument that [Craigslist is] really sort of pimping," says University of British Columbia Associate Law Professor Janine Benedet. While prostitution is quasi-legal in Canada, "communicating for the purposes of prostitution" is flatly illegal, as is underage prostitution. So Craigslist ought to face penalties, say the Canadian cops and social workers, for providing a venue where teenagers can post photos, rates, and collect customers — or where pimps can do it for them. More »
e-commerce
Repair your F-14 with parts from eBay
The United States Armed Forces no longer use the F-14 fighter jet, which can make it a real pain for armies that do, such as the Iranian air force, to repair theirs. Fortunately, there's eBay and Craig Newmark's Internet-based love-in, Craigslist. The U.S. Government Accountability Office reports that F-14 spare parts and troop equipment such as night vision goggles can be found and purchased from both sites. "Many of the sensitive items we purchased could have been used directly against our troops and allies, or reverse engineered to develop counter measures or equivalent technologies," read the GAO report. Another instance when a few buyer ratings could go a long way. (Photo by James Gordon)
nerdfight
Craigslist whines like a toddler in countersuit against eBay
Craigslist has filed suit against eBay in San Francisco County Superior Court, alleging trademark infringement, breach of fiduciary duty, anti-competitve trade practices and deceptive advertising. Why California? Because the state has some of the strictest antitrust and competition trade laws in the country. Craigslist is asking the court to award damages and force eBay to divest from the online classifieds site. Also alleged? That eBay was a big meanie. The best parts: More »
geek love
Craig Newmark angles to take Phil Bronstein's livelihood, woman
At the party for Jonathan Zittrain's new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark couldn't settle for destroying San Francisco Chronicle editor-at-large Phil Bronstein's profession — he may be after Bronstein's woman, too:Craig told my wife she was out of my league. I know that! This is the guy who destroyed newspapers? Master of the obvious. But he's come a long way himself from the days when he was his own best browser in the Craigslist "Missed Connections" section.(Photo by AP/Benjamin Sklar)
separated at net worth
Is Craig Newmark a Leninist, or just a lookalike? Don't ask a newspaper man
In the wake of eBay's suit against Craiglist, we get a touch more fear and loathing from a newspaper about the online classifieds site and local bulletin board from the Times:[Craigslist] is also a site that is deeply tied up with the fate of newspapers — indeed, many in the newspaper industry blame the site's founder, Craig Newmark, for the downturn in their classified-advertising business.The Times pegs the company's revenue at $80 million to $100 million annually — a lowball estimate, from what we hear — and gets founder and chairman Newmark to admit he's never donated more than $20,000 to any particular cause. But it's the kicker that makes on wonder how enthusiastic a capitalist Newmark is. "We know these guys in Google and the eBay guys, and they are not any happier than anyone else," says Newmark. "A lot of money is a burden." $10 million, his estimated take from a deal with eBay to let them buy shares in Craigslist, must not be enough for Newmark to feel burdened. Give it away, Craig — you have nothing to lose but your chains! Not to mention the Times photo, in full below, which made me wonder whether Newmark and Lenin were separated at birth. More »
sex trade
