sex trade
Everyone's favorite blowjobs-for-hire site has pledged to appease 40 state attorneys general by "
curbing prostitution ads." You can read Melissa Gira Grant's
in-progress response, but the kicker is CEO Jim Buckmaster's promise to start charging $10 a pop or so for
Erotic Services ads. It's not pimping, it's protection — haha! I knew I couldn't say that with a straight face.
blogging for dollars
Tim White, the operator of Craigslistblog.org, an unofficial blog about the free classifieds site, is throwing in the slightly soiled towel. Craigslist, which launched its official blog well after White launched his in March,
threatened him with legal action over its name in April. Craigslist's lawyers and White have been going back and forth since then. White tells Valleywag Craigslist has now offered him a settlement: If he agreed not to sell the domain name or run advertising, they'd let him keep the site. Instead of agreeing to it, he's shutting down the site.
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jackpot
We need more gushy
"Internet rich dudes, they're just like us!" star profiles, don't we? The problem is, in the Valley, too few are willing to flaunt their success. Take
this piece of fiction about Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist's CEO, in the Times of London: "He lives in a modest, rented apartment not far from the company’s global headquarters, a rickety 19th century house tucked between a pizza restaurant and a junk shop in San Francisco." If a "modest apartment" is a freestanding house — a rarity in San Francisco — which can accommodate 40 people for Thanksgiving, then sure. The article also repeats an old canard about how Newmark doesn't have a place to park his car — when he's had parking behind the house he owns for years.
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craigslist
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?
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jim buckmaster
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?
nerdfight
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:
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party report
This is what I remember from last night's VentureBeat party: A social network for golfers
announced a round of funding at the event. A social network for golfers? Is this what blogging has come to, I asked founder Matt Marshall. He gamely held his ground and ducked the question. As Kara Swisher documented in the clip above, VentureBeat's party at the Ambassador in San Francisco was a bubbly affair, packed wall to wall with free drinks for all comers — until the bar turned cash. That kept the event, paid for by sponsors, profitable, Marshall explained. I'm glad the blog bought me a drink. I needed it when I ran into Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster later that evening. He was perfectly civil, but it's disconcerting to talk to a man to whom one only comes up to clenched-fist level.