| Let’s say your weekend "to do" list is this: Buy a lawn/rooftop Santa with sleigh and reindeer, find your cat, get a new roommate, find tickets to the next Flames game, join a scrapbook meeting group and sell your collection of porcelain giraffes.
It’s a bit daunting, but there is a place where you could potentially get it all done – from home. Craigslist (Calgary.craigslist.org) is essentially an online classified page. On your screen, it even resembles a classified page from any newspaper. It’s heavy on text and light on ads.
But Craigslist is much more than that. It is like Freecycle, Calgary Dollars, traditional classifieds, job-boards, forums, the Bargain Finder, Lavalife, a flea market and a soapbox all rolled into one page on the Internet. And it’s all based on community and it’s totally free.
San Franciscan Craig Newmark started Craigslist in early 1995 as a small listserv informing people about events in the city. As the number of users grew, Newmark, a computer programmer, wrote software that would automatically add e-mails to postings and the site was born.
Craigslist has since become hugely popular in many major centres. It now has 190 sites in all 50 U.S. states and 35 other countries, and gets more than 10 million unique visitors a month. The site and community it spawned even became the basis for a documentary film in 2004, 24 Hours on Craigslist.
But Calgary’s Craigslist has been around for almost a year and you’ve likely never heard of it. Which is one of the unique things about it – Craigslist doesn’t market itself at all.
"We rely solely on word of mouth," says Susan MacTavish Best, one of 18 Craigslist employees based in San Francisco. "A site takes about a year to really get going, so to market the site any other way would not be a good idea."
It seems that word about Craigslist is spreading slowly in Calgary. The site is currently getting 700,000 page views and 1,000 new classified ads a month. It seems most Calgary users have learned about the site by living in other cities. One such user, who recently posted an ad in the Rideshare section looking for a lift from Calgary to Toronto, is 24-year-old Chriz Miller.
"I never found a ride," says Miller. "Mostly due to the lack of popularity of the site. Such a site requires a critical mass of people to function well. The more Calgarians hook into it, the better it will become."
Though he never got a ride, Miller has had success in the past. "I’ve found rides from Montreal to Nevada, places to live and furniture through Craigslist. It actually helped me find the place I live in Toronto now."
The concept behind Craigslist is pretty simple. The more people use it, the better it becomes. While this applies to the utility of the site, it also applies to the pleasure gained from the many weird posts. The site has a "best of" section displaying many of the wonderfully absurd posts from Craigslist around the world. Current jewels are: Free bar of Yugoslavian soap; Looking for a terrible boyfriend for one week; I don’t need a ride or a ticket to Burning Man; STOP fake jogging around my neighbourhood just to bump into me.
From those trying to rid themselves of Yugoslavian soap to those looking for a ride to Toronto, Craigslist certainly has a broad appeal.
"At this point, the folks who use Craigslist run the gamut," says MacTavish Best. "The site is all about getting everyday stuff done. And that’s appealing to a fair number of folks from all walks of life." |
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