 Hi, I'm David Weinberger with the Center. It's my complete pleasure and honor to introduce Craig Newmark of Craig's List to a very informal, but by the way, webcast session. So you should just be aware of that. And whatever you're saying will be recorded and used against you. Craig, as you all know, has a very special place in the history of the internet, having been one of the earliest people to throw his trust into us, onto people, and having it work out beyond anybody's expectations. Besides the list of what you know, you may also know about Craig's philanthropic activities, as well as some political and media-centric, and just a lot of interesting stuff. So we're very lucky not only to have Craig here today, but to have Craig on the net. So welcome to the Workman Center. And what we usually do, and I think we should do, is go around quickly. People say who they are, the whole line of attribution. And then we'll throw it to you. And sure, throw it open whenever you want. So how about you? You want us to know about the workman center from the Netherlands? I'm going to be in the middle of the workman fellow. And I'm also in the free-all of the law school. David Loschal of the Workman Staff. Caroline Nolan of the Workman Staff. Dr. Lewis undergrad. Ian Jones of the Workman Staff. Alex Offs of the Communications Team. Chris Babitz of the Clinical Fellow of the Workman. Ed Pocco of the Workman Assistance Group. James Zienalia of the Tulell at the Law School. Laura Harris of the Tulell at the Law School. Dan Carlos Perot of the Workman Assistance School. Anthony Cameron of the Pre-Chair of the Law School. Sean Fitzroy of the Filmmaker and Freelance Video Preser for the Workman. Sebastian Diaz of the Workman Geek. Amir Asher of the Workman Staff. Robert Farris of the Workman Center. Jennifer Shkabatoor of the Students of the Law School. I'm Victoria Sadden of the Workman Staff. I'm Rue Dulles of the First-Year Law Student. Judi Blurry of the First-Year Law Student. Rue Rodriguez of the Law School. That must be quick. Yeah, let's see. There's different ways I can do this, because normally when I'm talking to folks, just by talking a bit about a history of Craigslist, that illustrates a lot what we're about and why things work. I will typically spend a few minutes talking about some of the things I do outside of Craigslist. There are some things that are just distinct, and that sometimes get conflated, usually, because I've screwed up the way I've articulated something. But I'm happy to talk to, well, to speak in whatever way you want, just to start with questions, if you so prefer, or to direct it in any manner that you'd like. What would you like? And Dave is all about history, since he's seen so much of it. Ouch. Well, I figure, both Twittering and all that, we're both just trying to regain our youth. It's tragic, but that's what you do. You don't think it's going to happen to you, but somehow. Because, yeah, I reflected. In June, I was back on my alma mater campus, this case Western in Cleveland. And the dominant emotion and reflection that I had was, I was such a nerd. And I would have been better had I, oh, let's say, engaged in socializing a lot more. Because I got a good education, but it was better than I needed. But anyway, the deal with Craigslist and, again, history, and I'm going to try to adjust the level of detail as you need, I can get more or less technical for the tech population here. Maybe some of it is permanent, but in 1994, I was at Charles Schwab back that point. And my big contribution was evangelizing the net, figuring that most brokerages of any sort would do business that way someday. Just back then, we had a guy who brought the NCSA server into the company and Mosaic browser. And that worked out, you know, that was pretty cool. But I would go around showing people even use net news groups and the well as examples of early virtual community. And as observing them, I saw a lot of people helping out a lot of other people in very generous ways. So I figured early 95. And I figured I should give back something because I had taken so much advantage of what I had seen. So I started a simple CC list for events, arts and technology events, stuff like Joe's digital diner, which was a big spaghetti dinner. And then people were doing new forms of storytelling using the latest multimedia, which at that point was pretty much anything where they hooked up a Mac to an LCD projector was new. But they could tell stories with illustrations in a nonlinear way. And actually, this was pretty good. And yeah, useful in ways that I probably never will understand. Then also, there was something called the Anon Salon, which is a fundraiser for Climate Theater back there, San Francisco. Now it has more of a burning man crowd component. And I'm not exactly the burner type, but it's still pretty good and pretty vital. But I would tell people about this stuff. It got passed around word of mouth. Again, this is early 95, the beginning of the dot combo. So I was lucky. And people kept asking me to be added to this mailing list. People suggested new categories of stuff, like, oh, apartments. That was my suggestion, actually. Jobs, stuff to sell. Maybe you guys could drag in some chairs. That's OK. Oh, there's chairs here. I'm sure this feels comfortable up here. But the deal is that, so people started suggesting stuff. My CC list kept growing. And I was using an old email tool called Pine, character mode, no point in click, easy on your hands, no way to transmit worms or viruses. So I was plugging away. And at 240 email addresses in the middle of 95, it started breaking, because that's an awful long character string. OK, so at that point, I had to give the thing a name. And I was going to call it SF Events, since it was still basically an events list. And people around me were smarter than me, saying, hey, we already called it Craigslist. Keep calling it that. It's personal and quirky. It's a brand. And I, at that point, really didn't know what a brand is. I learned quickly, but they were right about it. The deal is that in our culture, there's the stereotype of a guy in high school, plastic pocket protector, thick black glasses taped together. And in my case, that cliche is literally true. I didn't belong to the AV club. But I did belong to the debating team, which is worse, because it creates dangerous illusions about the effectiveness of logic and reason. And I labored under that delusion for many years. And the nerd thing, one can acquire some social skills, but you're still a nerd. And I'm comfortable with that now. I've accepted it. But anyway, there I was. And again, later on in 95, this thing keeps growing. And all the database is basically emails and email folders in Pine. And at some point, suddenly I realized that, oh, I'm a programmer, I can write code which turns emails into HTML. I can reach in for the subject or whatever. And that worked out pretty well. I had instant web publishing. And over the next few years, when it was just me running this as a hobby, I would make refinements of the software. I would think that whenever something started taking a task started taking more than an hour a day, I could usually write some code to automate it in part or in whole. And that was pretty good. So I would do that. And that kept things pretty good. At the end of 97, I hit three milestones more or less simultaneously. Hit about a million page views per month. Not bad at that time. That's a million. Tangentially, I'll mention that we hit a billion in August of 2004. And now we're heading towards 13 billion. About 50 million unique visitors a month. That's our guesswork based on what we see in the free measurement sites like Compete or Alexa. I do know that the measurement sites all vary very widely in their estimates. 26 people are at the company. OK, I also, Microsoft Sidewalk, approached me. Again, this is around December of 97. They asked me to run banner ads. And I figured, I don't like banner ads. Many of them are just too dumb, and they saw a site down. And I don't need the money since I'm an overpaid programmer, which is not unattractive. So I figured no banner ads. And years later, I said, hey, no pop-ups. And that's OK. And then some folks approached me about running the thing on a volunteer basis. And that seemed kind of good, because it was screwing up some of my time. And I'm not on 24 by 7 or anything like that. So I figured that was a pretty good idea. And that year, 98 didn't work out well. The volunteer thing didn't work, partially because the volunteer operation only works when you do some strong leadership. And I was not providing it, because I was like working for a living. However, people at the end of 98 approached me and helped me get out of my denial about my need to exert some leadership. So in 99, I made the thing into a real company. That meant doing what you do in the US, corporation papers, actual corporate governance, that kind of stuff, some financial controls. And I did a mediocre job at it, at best, because we kind of limped around for a while. We were able to pay people to do things. So things were solid in that sense. But again, I was doing a job which could be generously described as mediocre. And frankly, I got lucky in one regards. I hired this Jim Buckmaster guy, who's a full foot taller than me. We were like a comedy team. And you'll see us, if you see us together with pictures where we're at eye level, you'll see at my request that I'm in the photo that I'm standing on a box. But anyway, I hired him. He's a really good manager. People helped me understand that as a manager, I suck. And Jim is much better. And that's the way things have worked. He's continued a number of our traditions. Like the deal, the way things, a lot of things worked, where that, again, back in 95, people would suggest things to me, like those new categories. And then I would try to figure out what suggestions made sense. And then I did something about them. And then I listened more and acted on suggestions. And that's a cultural part of our culture, which we continue to this day. Back then, also, I realized that I have no design abilities. But I know how to keep things simple. And that's why our site is as simple as possible. And also in 99, I figured, well, I'll ask people, hey, how should we pay the bills and do a little beyond that? And they said, sure, charge people who already paid too much money for less effective ads. And specifically, there was some consensus to charge for job ads, to charge employers and recruiters, not job seekers, and then to charge real estate people, like agents. And we only charge apartment brokers in New York City for apartment listings, where real estate, there is a blood sport. And they asked us to charge them to cut down on certain varieties of scam, but to also eliminate the perceived need to post and repost. Because back then, I realized I saw programmers talking about our mutual surprise that people would pay purely generous amounts of money for the exercise of our skill programming, which we consider fun. And from that, I generalized to nerd values once you make enough to live comfortably, including providing for a future. After that, you don't need a lot more. It's more fun to change things. And that's worked out pretty well. There was a question, because I'm just so smart, aren't I? And the deal, OK, so there we are. 2,000 gym takeover starts to run the company on a much more serious basis. Because we are a serious business. The deal is that we evolved something which you could call a business model, an MBA wouldn't, but it's basically we can do well as a business by just treating people well and trying to do a little bit of good. And just by coincidence, in my case, luck and Jim's case skill, we managed to follow through. And the year subsequently 2,000, just slow, continuous progress. In the middle 2000, we got a lot of requests for new cities. So we added the first five in the middle 2000. New York, LA, and I think Boston was one of them. We also made, I remember, one big mistake in the middle 2000. We anonymized all emails that were on ads. The mechanism exists today, but we just unilaterally introduced it for all email addresses as you see them on ads. To that way, a temporary relayed email address, what that meant was that if a spammer got that address, it would only be useful for a little while. Not bad, but people said, hey, they didn't want that. They wanted the choice. Because sometimes your email address is a kind of personal or commercial branding. So that's not bad. That worked out. The guys, I was traveling at the time, too, but they were able to turn it around the change in a couple days. So that's pretty good. We try to stay nimble and fast. Sometimes difficult when you're getting conflicting feedback from people. The worst case of that is when it comes to animals and ads relating to pets or so-called backyard breeders. Because some people hate the idea of that, and some people like it. But it's resulted in bickering, which in some cases has crossed the line into a criminal harassment. Because people feel very strongly about that stuff. And in the customer service team, we've had the adventure of dealing with the police in new and unexpected ways. Just to be clear, I am in Craigslist now. I am a customer service rep. I'm founder and technically I'm chairman of the board. And I do have some real corporate governance responsibilities. But I spend my time generally in customer service. And that's been true for going on 14 years. That's too long. So that's why I'm going down to halftime on it. The deal is you sometimes see some really ugly things doing customer service. Sometimes just, well, about a month ago, we saw a surge in really ugly racist material regarding the election. And that subsided somewhat. But it's still worse than we'd like it to be. But that takes something out of you. So again, halftime customer service now. But the deal is that if you email craig at craigslist.org, that's me. And even if it gets into the spam filter, spam folder, I will probably find it. The first thing in the morning is a bad time to send something to me, since that's when I have my heaviest customer service workload, east and west coast. And that's when the spammers have done the most. So it's most likely I'll miss something in the spam folder. I've only regretted giving out my email address once. And not so much just giving it out as not saying I would respond with a form letter. This was on the view. And I had about 250 emails by the time I got back to the hotel room with another 100 to follow. The only really frightening experience I was sitting next to Star Jones. So that's customer service there. Over the last several years, maybe more than several, we've begun to understand what makes us work, why we're successful. A lot of it has to do with that business model, if you'd like to call that. But also the notion of this culture of trust we have. I mean, our user community realizes there are bad guys out there, but they're a very tiny percentage of the population. And people look out for each other. And that works pretty well. We have this flagging mechanism. If you can flag an ad, if you think it's wrong for some reason. If other people agree with you and flag it for removal, it's removed automatically. That's a voting system. And like any form of democracy, it's flawed. Like the quote is, democracy is a lousy form of government, but it's the best we've tried. And I don't think Churchill is writing much anymore. But John Stuart got Jefferson to write for the forward to his book. So we may get a quote out of Winston anyway. John Stuart also made a great comment about the prevalence of crooks or crazy people on the net saying that you do hear more from extremists or whatever, because moderates have stuff to do. And that's why he's one of America's most trusted newsmen, part of the best political team on TV. The deal is so we trust our community, so we've given them this much power over the site. And again, what seems to work, the way we've gotten this culture of trust, is by, well, from the beginning, acting on shared values, which we've only come to recognize and articulate in the last several years. The deal is no matter where you're from throughout the whole world, the people who are not crazy think that you should treat people like you want to be treated. Not just take that sentence for granted, but to follow through with it, hence customer service. Then there's corollaries to that, like live and let live, and just sometimes give the other person a break. And there's nothing profound in this stuff. It's just the hard part is following through as flawed human beings. We try to follow through and do what we can. There's almost nothing as destructive as having your phone vibrate in your pocket. Only I could find that. There we go. That's the wrong way to phone. There we go. Anyway, the deal is that we try really hard on that. It works. And we're trying to listen to people still. At this point, novel suggestions are rare, as you might imagine. But the idea is that we decide on new cities based primarily on requests for them, usually electronic. People mail them in or put them in our discussion boards. When Jim's in the mood, he looks at the cities and how much serious internet usage is in them. And then he'll fire off templates when he's in the mood for new cities. We're up to 567 now, 55 countries. Sometimes we figure things out like I got a lot of verbal requests, not electronic requests for Ramallah, so I talked Jim into that one. And now and then we figure out some request from the community without an explicit request. Like, well, like some years ago, we figured out, oh, thinking single moms don't get a break. But we figured all parents need babysitters, hence our child care section. So we are capable of some independent thought. But for the most part, what's on the site is based on community feedback. That's what you see on the site as visible. Again, almost everything about Craigslist, on the surface at least, is based on what we hear from people. And that's even true in my very first three years. I have no vision at all, but I know to keep things simple, and I can listen some. Underneath the covers, for a year since 1999, we've been our architectures Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl, specifically ModPerl, if anyone cares. In the first few years, we were on Solaris systems and a borrowed Linux system. But now, in each of our server farms, we have, I think, around 250 cheap PCs running sucilinix. That may change, the boxes or the distribution, who knows. But the deal is that I'd written version one of our software way back, evolving, starting in 95. And then, road version two, in late 1999, instead of using pine email folders as our database, seriously, I used MySQL and then I stopped coding because my time was more valuable on customer service. That's when we started getting a team of sysadmins and programmers, all of whom are more talented about it than I am. But customer service is a great fit because it signals our commitment to customer service. And that ain't bad. And the deal is now, what we do is we have a whole bunch of web-based tools, the primary platform for the tool usages, Firefox. And we do use a very advanced email tool, which is very fast and, again, virus resistant. The advanced email tool, which I'm normally running, is called Pine. And when I speak in a very technical audience, that's hilarious. But that's seriously the tool that's our primary email tool because, again, it means I'm not point and clicking, so my chances of RSI or whatever are smaller than if I was using something else. I do have some video on quick, qik.com, where I ask Marissa Meyer from Google about it. And because she uses pine and I say, that's hot. Because there's the Paris Hilton of the internet factor, by which I mean me, not Marissa. But you also see a couple of I, in there I have a couple of SCC guys talking about policy. And I try to talk them into reenacting a wardrobe malfunction. I don't, yeah, I couldn't convince them to actually do it for one of them as a standing commissioner and the other as a former chairman, so. And I can think of better ways to get in trouble. So this day, again, we just, OK, we keep plugging away with the stuff I've talked about. Again, my role, customer service, half time. I need a break. But again, I've reflected on many of the reasons why Craigslist works and what's become our real mission in this. Because we are a good example of the way people collaborate in mundane ways to make things happen. Not bad. And then reflecting further on that, about six, seven weeks ago in New York on Washington Square Park, my way to one web day, I realized all of a sudden, oh, what I am really is a community organizer. And that's one of the best expressions of grassroots democracy. Not bad. To be technical, since we're at Harvard, I'm more of a meta-more organizer. Because here I am helping people connect, get any other, with the very attractive feature that to do this, I don't have to remove my backside from my chair. And again, very desirable. So I figure, so increasingly over the last several years, I've been helping out in other areas. Not philanthropic. I mean, nothing about Craigslist, from my point of view, is altruistic. Nothing is noble. Nothing is pious about it. The deal is that there are people, lots of people around who just spent a lot of time giving another person a break. Not bad. So I figured I should extend this to other areas. Some expected, some unexpected. I'm involved helping people smarter than me with the future of journalism and media. Like I've been up at the Neiman Center here, that kind of thing. We're in, you know, I met people like, I met Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen and a lot of folks who are doing new things to try to figure out what's happening. Jeff just sponsored a few weeks ago a future of the news business kind of summit at City University. And there was a lot of good stuff there. A lot of people doing new things and a lot of discussion about how do you pay for reporting, particularly investigative reporting. And in fact, since I'm working a bit with the folks at the Berkeley Journalism School, I'm saying, hey, maybe they should talk. And also, they've started some really impressive hyper-local stuff, like through the Mission Neighborhood in San Francisco or for some parts of Oakland in California. You know, Oakland across the Bay. So I'm doing that kind of stuff in terms of new aspects of governance. I'm thinking, well, I'm out of my depth there, but I'm working with a lot of people. Because I'm reflecting that what's different about the internet that's changed our lives? Because people have worked together face to face for a while. People, you know, and the Romans had a form of representative democracy. It didn't have a written constitution for the most part or checks and balances. They were pretty crude. But they did OK for quite a while. But you know, towards the end, the Republic had situations where rich guys would start wars for profit and vanity. And of course, that can't happen with our system of checks and balances. But the deal is there's stuff to be learned from all that. Because even in recent centuries, recent years, people would get together to make stuff happen. Our founders created a system which was very flawed, in a number of ways. But as systems of representative democracy created 230 years ago, it was a good start. Some of those problems were fixed. And they left some room for grassroots democracy where people could get together and make stuff happen. But only in the hundreds or maybe thousands at a time. Because face to face communications is generally better than online. Because there's no substitute for all the nonverbal channels you got when you're talking to each other. But face to face doesn't scale. Well, with the internet, we've got much more distributed forms of communication. We've got thousands, hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of people working together to make stuff happen. And I think this changes entirely the nature of our grassroots democracy, wherein grassroots efforts can complement representative democracy to address a lot of the remaining flaws and just to make stuff happen. The dean campaign pioneered this. And we can never give enough credit, I think, to Joe Trippi and Zephyr Teachout. And the deal there, too, is that now this other campaign has had some success enlisting millions of people who would normally not want to be bothered of politics. That includes me. Because my natural tendency is to be a couch potato. But the idea is that it even got me involved. In fact, I'm still wearing the stupid Barack watch. I have to decide, as I should, I remove that on the fourth. Maybe I remove it on the 20th. I don't know. But the deal is now that there are people working together now to figure out, well, we got this big network grassroots thing. How do we take that forward to make it real so that on January 20, the nature of governance changes? Because I've been saying that 2008 is the new 1776. And since I do have a rich fantasy life, I'm saying that 2009 may be the new 1787. Now, of course, I could be entirely full of crap about this. But like the guy says, I'm as stubborn as the garbage bags that time will not decay. And if you look up the quote, you'll see someone express in poetry what I consider a prayer regarding all this. I'm sure David will be tempted to look it up if no one else will. Yeah, if not, I can give you a clue later. But the deal is why I think big things are happening and in all sorts of ways that are pretty good, like Wikipedia, the observation I make about that, which you've heard all the rest. But it used to be that the guys with power and money and guns who won the wars got to write history and our narratives about ourselves. Well, with Wikipedia, everyone is a shot at doing that. And that's also a change in the way that, well, it changes the whole course of human history, from my point of view. And I don't think we're just at an inflection point now. But we are at genuine singularity, where things are changing in big ways. We're kind of living in a time machine fantasy kind of time. Because sometimes you wonder what would happen if you could take a time machine back and see what was happening in 1776 or whatever. But we're living in a time like that now. It's happening faster than any historic milieu because the internet accelerates everything. But this is pretty cool. So I'm trying to pay attention to what's happening and to play a microscopic part in it. Because I need to get on more often, so that's my idea of a hobby. In addition, like so, part of the big movement here is this whole idea of accountability and transparency. You put online everything a government is doing. And you can see, if you could see how the sausage is made, you can raise the level of hygiene. For example, if you see where lobbyist money goes, how it's being used, what favors they get contracts or legislation, well, once you see it, you can start to do something about it. The best disinfectant is sometimes sunlight. Some involve the Sunlight Foundation, who's created a network of sites to document what's going on. They're building databases where it's easy to find stuff. Not bad. I don't get a lot of phone calls, but for some reason I'm getting them all now. So I'm more involved with that. I'm involved, figuring that as an increasingly middle-aged guy, appliance reviews get me excited. So I'm working with Consumer Reports to be real clear I'm on the board of Consumers Union and, for that matter, sunlight. Mundane stuff, but real stuff. I was involved a little bit in San Francisco's 311 program. You call up a number or eventually report on their site that you got a pot all you need fixed, you get a fixed. Mundane, but it's part of everyday governance. In my fantasies, I apply that to all levels of government. That could mean something. So this kind of stuff, a good chunk of it, which is in the Obama platform, the idea is it's potentially real, and I think we're going to see it happening for real next year. But in this role of community organizer, I can give a little bit of advice and a little bit of money since I know something about online organizing, but I get involved in groups and do what I can to get the word out to help out. Sometimes there are groups of folks who have been treated badly, sometimes by the White House. So I figure, well, one group of people who have been treated pretty badly are veterans returning from Iraq or Afghanistan and their families. So I'm now increasingly involved with the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans of America, IAVA.org. I was at a board meeting yesterday, I mean literally yesterday, assuming my sense of time hasn't collapsed entirely, which is possible. We don't have seasons in San Francisco. But I'm getting increasingly involved in their efforts. For example, to get the new GI Bill passed and now to increase their medical attention, the Veterans Administration has several hundred thousand claims unprocessed that needs to be accelerated. And I'm suggesting that the purpose of screening claims is sometimes to minimize fraud. And I'm saying, hey, maybe we shouldn't care about that because there's literally hundreds of thousands of people, veterans and their families who are suffering because their claims are waiting processing. The deal there is, if I'm saying something, maybe a few people will hear and then that message will spread. As a nerd, perhaps I shouldn't be doing anything relating to promotion or communications or public relations. That's a crime against nature for one of my people to do. But I'm doing it anyway. Because again, there's lots going on here and there's a lot of interest in people working together and doing more stuff. And the idea of people getting more involved in service makes a great deal of sense. I've read what people say about the millennial generation, that there's a new civic generation here, kind of like my parents' generation, World War II and depression. And man, we really need it right now. I do have one request of the kids that you stay off my lawn. But aside from that, it looks like we will have a new kind of administration in place. And that matters. The message gets out and it's going to help us out in customer services, in extent, because sometimes we have to help out with a criminal situation on the list. And the deal there is that when we talk to a cop, well, we finally don't really need to remind them of a due process and all that. For some reason, we get lucky in that regards. We never get hassled about that, which is good because we've been, for years, behaving as if constitutional rule of law was still in effect over these past eight years. Many of you are too young to remember when we had a rule of law in this country and an active Bill of Rights. Although, of course, some of you may remember when the Constitution was passed. But the idea is we behave as if it was still in effect. And again, the Constitution will be restored on January 20th. So I'm looking forward to that, but we've been behaving as if it was still an active document through these years. So that's Craig's List and, again, some of the stuff I've been doing outside of Craig's List. If you look at my blog, CNewmark.com, and you'll see a lot of my stuff condensed there. Either I'll be amusing myself or promoting the efforts of someone doing really smart stuff that's effective. You'll see that my focus is on people who are effective at getting stuff done. I may lack the patience I should have with people who mean well, but don't know how to get things done. And they may consume a chunk of your time without results. And my grateful, frankly, is a lack of patience. On the other hand, too, while I like the sound of my own voice, only for so long, and that time is ending now, this is a good time for more questions. Really, young guy. Are there any ways that Craig's List has just gone in directions you couldn't imagine or any categories that you could never have foreseen? For the most part, well, a big chunk of them. I guess I never tried to foresee them, so it's hard to answer. I had to be half-wide of my arm twisted regarding personals because I figured there would be problems. But actually, they've done much more good than problems, like misconnections. And I get routinely invited to weddings and sometimes asked to officiate. I have to remind them that by virtue of running Craig's List, that gives me no power to legally perform marriages. Seriously, I have had that at a high and full of times. And just surprised categories, I can't think of many specifically. In a way, the whole thing has been a surprise because, again, I have no vision. I just responded, for the most part, to feedback. That's the first three, four years. Jim does that now. And it's all very surreal. But that's life now. We're to succeed over ostensibly the same thing that happened on use net, and more people would be disposed to use use net in the 1990s. Well, part of it, I've never been asked this variation of the question before, but part of it is simply that everyone understood email or just casual browsing, which is what we were about for years. Whereas news groups, no one provided a nice, simple interface for that until Google did it after buying, I think, Deja News. And by then, that chip had sailed. So use net news groups were commonly ad spammed really badly. And no one took any responsibility for addressing that, not normally. And we have a problem with ad spam. And like last week, we announced litigation against some of the people who sell ad spam software, figuring that was a good way to do it. Because we're not litigious. We don't like using the lawyers. But this was the right way to do things. And actually, we do have a pretty good firm. But that's the use net news groups illustrated the tragedy of the commons. Last time I looked, which is a while ago, there were big news groups who would just be overrun with ad spam. Some aren't, usually the moderated groups. But still, it's, and they're so useful in number of cases. For that matter, people are still active on the well, including me, well, as active as I ever was. But I think the news group ship did sail. Has there been a problem keeping Craigslist simple on its face with these requests for features and requests for other things? Is it something that you tried to set as a goal, or is it something that the culture has set? Keeping it simple is just something, I guess, that's habit. So that's easy. There are times when we have to debate whether or not there should be a certain category or not. Or like in the discussion boards, should we require people to register with a valuable email address just to minimize abuse? And some of those decisions are a little difficult. But the simplicity thing, I don't know how to do things except to do them simply. And I think the same is true of Jim. The software underneath is more complex. But that's something people don't see. I just came in about a week and a half ago, you guys announced the deal with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. And this is sort of a quasi-government, quasi-non-government organization. And the changes you announced seem to be more aimed at providers of adult heroic services than not children. So I'm wondering how consensual was this deal between Nick Mac and Craigslist? And how much were you sort of pushed into doing this? Well, Jim was the guy who was involved in it. So he knows the details. The deal is that there was genuine abuse of our site. There were a number of proven cases of some really ugly abuse of minors. And our big concern was just dealing with that. And since we're not law enforcement professionals, we got help from people who were the real experts. And we took their advice. The deal is, again, there is that kind of abuse. And we got to help out how we can. And we just started charging for people posting in erotic services. And we'll be contributing all the profits from that to philanthropy, seeing that that's a good way to do it. We're even going to have the auditors keep an eye on us to make to verify that all that's happening. Beyond that, frankly, Jim felt very strongly about that. And he's the CEO, so he handled that, which, frankly, I appreciate. Yeah, because, yeah, right now, I just, again, frankly, dealt with too much ugly stuff for too long. And some of it, I'm really tired of, like, unfortunately, this day, I saw a really ugly image that I can't get out of my head. I'll blame you, of course, but, yeah. And by the way, if you know how to work around Torah proxies, I could use it. If we can use a hand on that. Sometimes bad guys do that. Yeah, the deal is that, again, personally, and again, speaking as a guy who's been a member of the EFF for, I'm guessing I'm 15 years, like, there's issues like anonymity. Like, sometimes you need anonymity and badly, like for whistleblowers. And by the way, I'm way over simple, all right. Sometimes you need accountability from people. How do you balance that? I sure don't know. We've made the decision to go more on the anonymous side. But, well, here's one case in terms of real governance that congressmen tell me they don't want to be subject to mass email campaigns, where everyone's just filling in their address and sending a form email. They disregard those in large part. But what they want are emails written by constituents, at least people that they have some competence probably really are constituents. So, you know, we now see evolving sites which actually do some good faith authentication. Not real authentication, but some good faith stuff that a person really is a constituent. And then an email from a person who's a constituent will have a lot more weight than a mass spanned email. So, how do we move ahead with that over the forthcoming years? So there's a case where some authentication and accountability is needed. Although even me without much thinking, I can think of ways where people might try to gain that system and that's serious. So we are talking about moving towards different ways to oh, to balance anonymity and authentication. But again, we do need anonymity as a kind of check and balance against oppressive government. And again, to allow whistleblowers to get you to blow the whistle. And it'll be interesting to see what happens on January 20th because there are a lot of career people in Washington, a lot of them have left because they couldn't stand it. But a lot of them have toughed it out and are interested in having a government again that works. Again, those of you who are just like new in college or whatever, if you're like 20, you haven't really lived as an adult with a government that functions. And that's going to change. I'm sorry, was that too cynical or too hopeful? There was one more question here somewhere or? Okay. Do you think your exposure to some of the uglier aspects of Craigslist that as you just mentioned has led you to see a more expansive role for government? I've gotten more balanced, but mostly because I've been doing customer service and I have seen a lot of suffering. So I'm shopping for a label and perhaps you guys have new hip groovy labels. But so now the best label I can figure is Libertarian-Moderate or Moderate-Libertarian. I don't really know because I am increasingly interested in public-private partnerships. I'm increasingly interested to world sorts. I see now more market solutions don't work like for healthcare in this country. You know, so like I don't, you know, if there's gonna be more regulation it has to make sense. What's worse for me is I'm involved in the net neutrality debate where I see people basically misrepresenting net neutrality as a form of expansive regulation. Unfortunately I've seen the CEOs of two telecoms just come out and lie about it. And that's disconcerting. And so I have to blog something about that. As I get more exposure to the sausage factory, well this is, here's an important, I see how lobbyists work. And my first exposure was thinking, oh, these are real bad guys and that's wrong. Most lobbyists are just trying to get their kinds of break, you know, which is a legislative and political reality. You know, depending on what you're doing you may have to have representation. Google is learning that the hard way. But most lobbyists just trying to get a fair break for their clients. Some lobbyists are pure public service ones, like the guys at the Iraq Veterans Group or the Sunlight Foundation people or the Consumer Reports people. There is a small number, apparently a very small number of really predatory lobbyists and it's not fair that their bad actions give the whole profession a bad name. So repeat, most lobbyists are okay, just trying to do a job. There are a small number of bad actors who have tainted the whole profession, not fair. And that appears that will be changing over the next few years. I mean, we've just started, it's going to be hard to overcome the effects of many years of abuse. But we'll see what happens there. But again, I see how in some areas I have seen lobbyists or related people trying to pick a fight, like net neutrality, to prolong the argument, because one thing is that when you prolong the argument, you can charge more hours. And I'm told that that's actually a real technique. And a technique which, well, I've spoken to people on telecoms. It's not like I speak to their abuse handling people, that kind of thing. And I'm saying, hey, the two sides aren't that far apart. There's disagreement, for sure, but not that far apart. And if you get rid of the people trying to pick a fight, you can come to some accommodation. And I'll have a feeling I'll be caught up in that next year. Yeah, the problem is I may have to go to Washington. And I think it's just too humid there. You know, I'm not looking for a job. You know, I'm committed to customer service forever. You know, but I have a feeling my life will change in some ways. Is there something you wanna tell us about your role in the new Obama administration? I don't think I'll have one, frankly. I talk to people who are, who matter, who are getting stuff done. I was part of a couple of the Obama committees. But, you know, and I'm ready to help out, but, you know, I'm helping people already pretty well in what I'm doing. You know, again, not looking for a new job. I do speak out as necessary, like I pointed out, again, since I see, well, across the country and in, frankly, the world, I see people who share many of the same values. Again, this notion that you wanna treat people like you wanna be treated. And you know, I see that's a genuine small-town value. And I also see, well, big cities are collections of neighborhoods, which is to say, small towns. So, small-town values, big-city values, same thing. People everywhere have areas of disagreement, but small-town values and big-city values are pretty much the same thing. People are generally eager to help each other out. And if someone's trying to pick a fight between small-town and big-city people, they're basically doing so to get attention and maybe to sell a book or, you know, get ratings. You know, it's basically a scam. And that's no good. I see David's fingers reaching for the keyboard. Other questions, folks? Well, I'll have the youngster ask a question. You talked about expanding the cities and stuff like that for price list to something like over 500 or so. The emphasis, though, still seems to be towards a local level instead of being able to do searches for used autos throughout the New England or something like that. It still seems to be here towards city or at least regional breakdowns. Was that a conscientious direction you tried to head in with them and keep that, or? Initially, just following our gut, but then realizing that there's a cliche about think globally, act locally. And then we live in a neighborhood, you know, and we connect, well, we connect with people around. Some, you know, because this encourages face-to-face communications. We need the more global mechanisms, too, but, you know, we're doing okay with the local stuff and that works out pretty well for people. Because it took me a while to figure it out, but Craigslist, in a way, is a flea market. It's a market place, kind of like a flea market or a mall or the Roman Forum or the Greek Agra, the Middle Eastern Suke. People get together to do commerce, but in a way, really, to socialize. I mean, I should have figured this out observing that my mother loves to go to flea markets. In fact, I like them, too. But Penelope Green from The Times talked about our site being a market place in the ancient sense, chaotic, unruly, and vividly human, and that's all about local stuff. And she was right, that was perhaps the smartest bit of commentary, except, of course, everything that David says. Who had a question? Yes. I believe, I heard you once say that your team, your company, your company, has never had a meeting? Did I just say that? We minimize meetings, you know, we've actually had some, but it's pretty rare. Yeah, and like I will see, at times, several of the tech people getting together to talk through some change, but we don't really have meetings in any real way. And I've observed personally that, first, a meeting of more than six people is already gonna be dysfunctional, just a small group of communication theory. But also, effective communication meetings is tough. Part of it is that brevity is the soul of wit, but people don't teach that. Of course, now, as a result of my saying that, I'm sure the Harvard curriculum can now be rewritten to include that. And, you know, this will also reflect my, again, my biggest vice, which is that I'm not as patient, a human as I should be. But that's actually- I've only had 14 years in customer service, so that is, it's a great deal of impatience. Well, people have observed that my answer is maybe excessively brief. A lot of my answer is maybe just be thanks. Because really, that's all, frequently, all someone wants to know is that you heard them. And that's not hard. There are some people, a practical problem is that no matter, well, you explain something, they're not reading what you wrote. And I'm in one of those right now. And I don't know quite what I'm gonna do to do with that. Maybe I just delegate upwards. Because, you know, we're gonna remember, I'm a customer service, we're a part of a team. My boss is the guy who runs customer service. And so I, in the position where I can kind of delegate up, and I hesitate to do that because it doesn't feel quite right. It's like the lessons of democracy, which I got from Mr. Scholsky's history class in roughly, I think, 70, 1970, because I'm old. I actually remember that stuff and I remember the attitude. You know, it was March 10, New Jersey, Washington spent a couple of winners there. So somehow it all sinks in somehow. If you could say something, what do you think will be the future of two-thirty of the communications DCC? Do you think it will stay the same or do you think it will be changed? This is the part of law that says that if a website acting as a, I think, a carrier isn't liable for what people say on the site, provided they take some responsible measures. And that's pretty good in itself. I'm not a lawyer, of course. I suspect some clarification of it might help. But it's pretty good. And I think it'll stay, possibly be improved. The irony of the thing is that we've seen a couple cases where there were a couple lawyers who wanted to, were thinking of suing us, who didn't know anything about the law. And I'm speaking without knowledge of the law, but I recommend that if you're gonna be a lawyer, you should know the law. This is my look where I'm looking to see if there's any other questions, even if people hesitate. Okay. Have you ever had a negative experience with police or law enforcement where you had to push back? Nothing, to my knowledge. Clint has handled a lot more of these than I have, so he may have seen it. The only one is, oh, I can think of two funny episodes. The first time called by the FBI, they're asking if I know that we have an ad for plutonium on the site. The bottom line, the punchline, is that someone got a stern talking to from his parents. The other time was when, I think it's Cambridge police, maybe Boston police, came calling because there was some burglary related episode somehow relating to our site. They had no clue what we were about, so they came knocking in somewhat suspicious mode, but I didn't read them as suspicious, so I just showed them what the site was about. They got it pretty quickly, and a year or so after I was actually asked to speak at the police offers association to talk about how we operate. Because frankly, the cops are catching on to this stuff, and in surprisingly positive ways, and they just don't want to be jerked around. They want someone to try to respond to search warrants or whatever in some kind of timely way, and in their own way, they just don't want to be treated abusively. And the idea is, to us, that's customer service. You just respond to people in a decent way, and that works, because sometimes bad things happen, and sometimes other people will waste their time and we try not to. I think it was two days ago I got a call. There was another gag posting about someone selling a baby, and even if almost certainly a joke, they got a follow through. Same thing with threats against, let's say, presidential candidates. And we prefer not to have our time wasted, they don't want to have their time wasted, but you got to do the right thing in any case. And fortunately, again, I don't handle much of that these days, but my phone number is deliberately spreading across the country for cops anywhere, and they just want to know that they're not going to be jerked around. So how do you, again, balance the need to do the right thing with four cops for victims and in a way for the country in terms of online individual rights? Again, Mr. Schultzke's lessons stuck with me in a way that has worked. And how do you balance this, how do you do stuff? Well, that's one reason I've been a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation for a long time and son of money and that ain't bad. That's EFF.org, everyone should join. Is there a question over here, almost? I just have a picture of that. I was wondering if there's any countries saying you don't let people search by specific subsection of cities for like apartment searches, is no way to search for just a section of Boston? We should have a way to search multiple cities in a given category. We don't have it. The reason has to do with the search facility in MySQL and it's expensive. It chews up a fair amount of server time and we don't want to slow other things down to make that faster. So the guys talk about it. They have some ideas of designing and building our own but there are bigger things that they're working on. We will be, as we hire more tech people, maybe we can shake loose some resource for that. But it's just pragmatics. There's other things we want to do, too, that we will get to sooner or later. And we do, we are hiring oh, programmers, sysadmins, and for them out of a little customer service. Yeah, in San Francisco, because all of us are at the moment in an old house in a commercial strip in the San Francisco neighborhoods, we probably will move downtown towards the financial district just because we've been looking for years, several years for a big enough space in the neighborhoods, can't find it. It has to be zoned right and all that. And so we will at some point move downtown, which is not too bad because San Francisco almost has good public transportation. We maybe should be, we kept Craig over an hour, we maybe should be wrapping up. Okay, again, it's craigandcraigslist.org. Afternoon much better than the morning. And the work weekend is good, too, since I work every day. Oh, thank you so much for coming by. It's my pleasure. You will like that. At the MIT thing I just spoke, there was a guy, a computer science professor, I think, or related, whose work I read when I was doing my master's work in roughly 75, and I told him I was glad he was still alive. That's 1975, not 1975. No, no, no, that was a good year though, 18.