Newmark describes himself as a classic nerd in high school, complete with a plastic liner to protect his shirt pockets from leaking pens, with taped-together black glasses, and lacking social skill Kornblum, When in , Newmark took a job in San Francisco, he used email to contact new acquaintances, and to provide information about local events and activities. Word-of-mouth helped the list grow, and in , Newmark decided to set up a wWeb site to handle the expanded traffic. By then, commercialization of the Internet was underway.
Gunkel and Gunkel compare the colonization of cyberspace to the age of European discovery of the new world, fueled by commercial interest. Newmark however, has attempted to keep his venture from becoming aggressively commercial. Today, craigslist is a World Wide Web portal defined on Webopedia. The original local site for San Francisco also serves as the home page of the portal.
Discussion forums pages to post messages with opinions about a variety of topics from movies to gardening to philosophy are offered simultaneously across all the sites for all craigslist visitors to participate in from anywhere in the world.
The format and style of the craigslist local sites are constant: very plain, with no frills. All sites use an English-language template, with most postings also in English. As of , there were over than million visitors to the sites β 25 million in the U. It has had the third largest market share among U. Web sites featuring classified advertising, after eBay and Monster. Craigslist itself does not advertise, instead attracting Web users by word-of-mouth Vargas, However, they are not completely averse to marketing; A PR firm has worked with craigslist since Gordon, Recent controversies have brought negative attention to the portal and its operations.
Techweb, , March 6. After the headline-grabbing murders, Craigslist eliminated the erotic services section, and in a break from past hands-off policy, monitored each message in a new adult services section Abelson, May However, continuing concerns about sex-related crimes that may have resulted from these advertisments, and the bad publicity that the adult services section was bringing to the portal, led to the management shutting down the new section entirely on September 3, If you try to build a third-party application designed to make Craigslist work better, the management will almost certainly throw up technical roadblocks to shut you down.
