An Interview with Craig Nerman of CraigsList.com

There is a really great interview with Craig Newmark of CraigsList.com by Katharine Mieszkowski on the FastCompany website. The CraigsList website receives around 5 million page views a month from thousands of visitors. CraigsList charges companies $45 to list job openings but all other listings are free. It’s almost like a giant free eBay website (eBay is free to use for buyers but not for sellers). Back on topic, below are my favorite two questions and answers from the interview and a list of Craig Nermans’s own Craigs list (of websites he likes).

What are the prerequisites for building a community?

Community starts with people having something in common, whether that is a subject that interests them or the city where they live. There’s a reason why people in a geographic community feel — or want to feel — connected.

We’ve lost contact with our neighbors. We don’t know who they are, but we crave contact with them. So creating a new place for people to interact with others in their own town is one way of establishing community. Geography is something that we all already have in common with our neighbors.

That doesn’t mean that members of a community must have the same values or beliefs. Shared values are useful to a community, but a common set of values is not mandatory. Neighbors have lots of important things in common, but they don’t necessarily have the same religious beliefs or vote for the same political candidates come election time.

So the way to build a community is to give people information.

Actually, the most poignant use of Web community is when you give people a voice. And if you provide the right kind of forum, anyone can have a voice. In any large organization, whether it’s a company or a part of the government, the people on the front lines know how to do things well. But the nature of large organizations is that they stifle those people. Over time, these people give up trying to be heard because they have the sense that no one is listening.

In that sense, community is about connecting people who need a break with people who might be able to give them one. It’s all about people helping one another. This idea is not new. For a long time, people in technology have been helping others online. You ask a question, you get an answer. It’s a pretty good deal. When you go to a technical conference and read someone’s name tag, you may realize that you’re meeting someone who may have helped you a year ago, or someone whom you’ve helped.

Craig Nerman makes some really great points in those two answers (and throughout the entire article) which can be helpful for anyone running online website or blog. Or it could give you an idea on a new community to start of your own. Find people with something in common and connect them in a new community where they can express there “voice”. Preferably it would be a new community where people don’t currently have a place to meet online in order to freely express there voice.

And Here’s Craig’s Own List:
What sites does one of the Web’s leading community organizers visit to keep up with the most recent developments in online communities? Here are some of Craig Newmark’s favorites.

BabyCenter.com, ThirdAge.com
These mutual-support communities provide parents and “third-agers” with a place to talk, share information, and give one another a break.

Deja.com, Epinions.com
People share opinions about different products through ratings and reviews. These sites help you decide what to buy based on what others say.

eHow.com
This new site asks experts to write instructions about how to do stuff — anything from polishing shoes to fixing a leaky faucet. But people can also make contributions about things that they know how to do. It’s not as community-oriented as some sites, but it’s useful.

NetDynamics.com, Quicken.com
These two commercial sites have real community. Sun Micro-systems’s NetDynamics site has a customer-support area in which people help each other with the server product. On the boards of Intuit’s Quicken site, people discuss money issues, ranging from small-business strategies to retirement planning.

NoEnd.org
Bay Area Internet developers get together twice a month in person and also share a mailing list. The site’s mission is “to humanize the technology we all work with.” As the site explains, “We are not about money, or jobs, or deals, or selling — those are just great by-products that we’ve found appear naturally in great abundance if not focused on directly. We exist as a group simply to relax and bring the pace of the Net down a few notches.” This is an example of a community that is about more than just networking.

SFgirl.com, posthoc.com, SFstation.com
At these Bay Area sites, you can read about bars, restaurants, stores, or local neighborhoods. Each has a unique style and attitude. If a site tells you that a certain club is great, then you may actually go there and connect with someone whom you’ve met online. These sites are about virtual and real-world communities.

sfmusician.com
This site combines a community of interest — musicians — with a place where people come together because they share geography. It helps local bands find musicians and advertise their gigs, as well as sell gear and exchange information about practice spaces. It’s a useful, real-world site.

You can read the entire Interview of Craig Newmark of CraigsList.com Here.