The New York Times carries a piece about online flea market/community message board Craigslist.
"The foremost lesson would be about community and how to sustain one online. Craigslist started in 1995 as an e-mail newsletter that Newmark sent to friends informing them of San Francisco cultural events. As interest grew, the newsletter became an online flea and job market and an essential community bulletin board.
"As investor-backed Internet companies began to surge in the late 1990s, Craigslist remained the tortoise. When the dot-coms fizzled, Craigslist was celebrated as an antidot-com, achieving--despite its lack of business plans, profit projections and tchotchkes with logos--the kind of mass acceptance that high-tech investors clawed for.
"When the bubble burst, Craigslist was left standing--a low-maintenance community site used by, among many others, former dot-com workers looking for jobs."
Comment: It's a nice look at the inside of an old-school dotcom firm - though there isn't much in the way of discussion about the site's finances. How does it raise enough money to employ 14 staff? Is eBay's recent aquisition of a 25% stake in the company really entirely benevolent?
Craig Newmark might well be achetypal of the old-fashioned übergeek with a focus on service rather than style, but I want to know where the $10m in revenues comes from.
