So, I got to meet Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigstlist at the Mesh Conference last week. And one thing struck me about the interview he did with Mark Evans that is only reinforced by the interview at Wired: Craigslist is an Internet phenomenon by any definition.

But Craig Newmark is no visionary. He’s no guru. And he’s no soothsayer. He’s a guy who lucked into his business, and it continues to succeed in spite of his lackadaisical efforts at starting it and running it.

No, I’m not referring to his anti-spam efforts — they may or may not be successful.

Rather, its a situation where he created a “half-assed” list of things that was happening in the San Francisco area, that ballooned into something much greater than itself. And thanks to some great timing (1996), Craigslist had the benefit of first-mover advantage that no other web concern has really had.

Profitable? Sure, in a way that makes VC’s drool. But classifieds are such a lean operation that it would be mind-boggling how it *couldn’t* be profitable.

I know one thing which drives me crazy is just how utterly slothful Craigslist is about monetizing itself. Jim Buckmaster was asked directly about the issue at Mesh, and basically gave the same answer that he gave for about 40 minutes: “we do what the community wants; if that’s not what the community wants, we won’t do it.”

To me, that strikes me as an enormous dodge, and a passing of the buck, as it were.

I respect the importance for sticking to your values. I understand that’s how Craigslist likes to clothe its business decisions. But not wanting to take advantage of an enormous opportunity to create an efficient business and maximize revenue — especially to do more Good … well, that doesn’t strike me as being wise. It just strikes me as being lazy.

I mean all this talk of having trying to take lessons from “unintended consequences”, an “unstructured approach”, and “getting out of the way when something good happens” — isn’t it as silly as trying to learn something from becoming the Prince of England? Mr. Newmark lucked into his good fortune, and continues to succeed, not because of some sophisticated corporate strategy, but the barest and most intuitive of tactics: listen to your customer.

Mr. Newmark might be a humble and affable gentleman. Mr. Buckmaster certainly seems so.

But let’s be honest — Craig Newmark was lucky as hell to stumble into Craigslist, and thanks to the enormous network effects and branding that’s generated out of it, it continues to grow into the behemoth it is today. In spite of what Craig and Jim do.

Some of whom I met, and some who I observed. All were interesting in their own ways.

1. Mike Arrington doesn’t want to be thought of as a guru — he wants to be first to report things. Being outrageous helps him, but why are you paying attention to him or what he’s saying? He’s not a guru or anything.

2. Tom Williams and Austin Hill *are* inspiring.

3. Loren Feldman is a funny guy and has a uniquely sharp talent of cutting through the BS in a funny way. That’s valuable. And funny. But I mentioned that already, didn’t I?

4. Paul Sullivan is a smart guy who knows a lot about journalism — and who is as enthusiastic as hell about it for being in the business as long as he has.

5. Steve Herrman has never been to Toronto or Canada until Mesh. I hope he had a good time. ;)

6. Ethan Kaplan is wicked smart. The way that he talks so smartly and so abstractly about — let’s face it, pirated music — makes it sound like thesis material. And it probably is for someone somewhere.

7. Richard Edelman, in spite of the Wal-mart fiasco, seemed really genuine about a desire for transparency and authenticity in public relations — in a this-guy-isn’t-faking-it kind of way. I mean it.

8. Jim Buckmaster only had one thing to say: “we do what the users want”. In spite of the wonder that is Craigslist, there wasn’t a lot of sophistication to his message. On the other hand, is that any surprise from someone described as a social anarchist or a communist?

9. Jeff Howe seems like a cool dude, and whose message about crowdsourcing was interesting and important: crowdsourcing is good for filtering. Not so much for certain kinds of content creation — like journalism.

10. Will Pate, in spite of his youthful looks, knows a hella lot about creating and maintaining community. How old is this guy anyway? :)

11. Lionel Menchaca was so down-to-earth and self-effacing about Dell’s community initiatives its a wonder that he’s a face of Dell. But he is. Which is amazing.

12. Ted Murphy isn’t the most evil man in the world, and PayPerPost isn’t. Well, probably isn’t. But he’s actually a pretty personable dude who really believes in what he does.

13. Mike Masnick is also wicked smart. I’m not sure who would win in a face off between him and Ethan Kaplan, but one thing’s for sure: *my* brain would explode.

Andrew Goodman talks to Christine Herron, Ted Murphy, Mike Masnick and Nancy Peterson on monetizing things beyond Adsense.

• On business models
  • MM: There’s a lot of stuff that’s free — what do you charge for and what do you give away … the more you look at the economics of things and the history behind things, you realize that every product is made of different components.  There are things that are infinte and some that are scarce.  And some have components of both.  Pens are scarce, but its a pen that’s from Staple that has is not scarce.  The inifite things can promote what’s scarce, and what’s scarce can be sold and monetized.  New scarcities are things like time and reputation.
•  Is there too much fear?  Aren’t there lots of creative ways to monetize?
  • MM: music is an obvious example — the recording industry is freaked out about the Internet.  But that’s because they incorrectly think they’re in the music industry — but they’re actually part of the music experience.  The song is the infinite component but everything else is scarce.  Concerts, seats, access to the concert, physical CD’s are still scarce, and can be sold if you can make it valuable — even if you give the music away.
• Web entrepreneurs are skilled at aggregating and creating content, such as portal and professional services.  What are the broader range of monetization tactics?
  • MM: The joke for web2.0 is Ajax, adsense and arrogance, right?  Advertising models work for some things and it works when you have community and attention — but its not something that lasts forever and it isn’t cyclical.
  • TM: When you look at impressions on a website, a lot of people don’t care where they come from. Value isn’t put on the content of the site that they came from.  What our model is to provide a way for the content creator to monetize the content they are creating.  There’s value in the content beyond the impression and the click.
  • CH: Costco gives away those creampuffs in store, but they wouldn’t give away any if some weren’t going to buy the big bucket of them.  You need to work out how many are going to be freeloaders and how many are going to buy the big bucket and cater to them.
• Display ads and Adsense, and in your case its different.  What are PayPerPost’s policies?
  • TM: the advertiser can set for the kind of commentary, positive, neutral or negative.  Most choose neutral.  But there’s some advertisers that say that people can say what they like *anyway* — why would I pay them to talk bad about it?  If advertisers specify something as positive only, its taken up  much slower than neutral offers.  It turns people off.  But my background is advertising.  Clients say we something that is integrated — something beyond banners.  And that’s really what PayPerPost is — integrating things into content rather than a simple ad unit that anyone can buy.
• Is PayPerPost a more obvious version of what we see already — Google’s Pay Per Action and so on.
  • NM: We launched homestars last year and long tail is the reason why we get traffic every day. Over 65% are one off terms for all kinds of home related terms. The learning curve for me is around building communities and in different geographic locales
• How do we get the market into that — into long tail content
  • NM: Its all about value to your users, and demonstrating that people who use have high intent.  Ikea, for example, is still looking for online venues, and they’re looking to homestars and have a high intent, with things like their cabinets.
• How does money change hands with popular niche sites built around popular topics?  Isn’t the big media stuff easier?  What are some of the things that are done wrong?
  • CH: Its in some ways easier to start and grow in scale when you’re going for the “head” — the competition is very different than going for the tail, its harder, in fact.
  • MM: The niche content players are aiming to get to the head in some manner.  What digitization does is open up the long tail where none existed.  Amazon and Netflix are examples where 20 years ago things like that never existed.  There was no long tail at Barnes and Noble or Blockbuster.
  • CH: Amazon and Netflix started by selling niche content.
• How confident would you be in terms of running quality content versus low quality content who are grabbing a few dollars by dominating the searches
  • MM:  If more and more content is good and credible it pushes you to create more content.
• Do freemium models actually work?
  • CH: You’d get a different answer re: content and services.  Services?  Its a hard thing to go at.  In content, its simply different content.  Porn, for example, cannot sell ads.  You must sell the content.  No one is going to buy ads for Porn.  Three is an overwhelming desire to pay a subscription for unlimited access — whether its the Wall Street Journal, or Porn.
• How we make adsense work better?
  • TM: It does work for some people.  But at the same time, if you look at how much traffic you need to make money, for most people it just doesn’t work out.  In the long tail, its hard to make money.
  • CH: Its easy to make a little money.  I think when you get a more meaningful income stream and when you get to charge a much higher rate.  If you sell specialized bathroom equipment for the elderly for example, even.
• Has the internet made niche content more local?
  • NP: No question — homestars, its all people connecting and talking about home renovations.  It all starts to spiral when companies start getting involved.  Being local is important for home renovations — and the same thing could be said for issues around health-geared content
  • MM: What this is all about is community — whether its people who have the same disease or experience — its all about building different communities.  Local communities are one way to define similar interests.
  • CH: With geography, some companies have raised a lot of money.
• What about video content and advertising?
  • MM: There are lots of different ways of looking at it.  How much advertising is generated around YouTube, what about pre roll or post roll — what doesn’t get counted is the fact that an awful lot of videos are actually advertising themselves.  If not a person, a brand, or someone’s ability as a movie maker or whatever.  It begins on how you define advertising — when you change your definitions, then you need to change your models  If you’re interested in getting something else then access, building community, and getting people to talk about your video is important — more so than pre roll ads.
  • TM: Our system allows people to make videos for the advertisers.  I can see a future where I have $100k to have a single video made, or get 1000 videos made by users and hooked up to YouTube.  Whether its product placement or commercials, I think there’s a big future.
• Isn’t the real long tail story about artists who couldn’t get a deal, but are now able to make a living?
  • MM:  If you’re trying to start a business — well, no one starts a business to make just enough to write a book, for example.  I think its a different discussion, but I don’t know how much interest there is in that (here)
  • CH: Specialized and niche businesses are different than things that turn into huge platforms and you have stuff in the middle which aggregates that smaller stuff.  You need to figure out who your closest competition and partner with them.  If you look at content, its a 50% partnership in many cases, but niche content providers have access to these things that larger providers cannot.

More on building a community with Lionel Menchacha, Will Pate, and Jordan Banks:

• “How do you manage that passion?”
  • WP: When I started at Flock, pick your title — well, I chose “Community Ambassador” because there were groups that weren’t happy with each other.  Its tough to manage but its important to create a safe environment
  • JB: Being passionately objective is important on all sides
  • LM: At Dell we don’t have the same issues, but we do have to deal with negativity.  We launched the blog because we have issues with customer support — and we’ve been going the wrong way for a while.  We had to deal with pent up negativity right out of the gate.  We had to know the reality we were up against — the other issue was what is the strategy … we’re going to blog about the problems but the ongoing process of improvement.  And apologizing for things that messed up.  And that’s scary for most corporations — just saying sorry.  But that what makes the company human — and it resonates with the company.
• “When you look at the business decisions EBay has made, how do you deal with satisfying business results at the expense of the community?”
  • JB: One of the tough thing about EBay is that we’re the biggest marketplace and we have a responsibility to tweak to create a fair market — because its not perfect.  We talk to lots of suppliers and buyers about how to create a fair equilibrium on all sides.  Not everyone likes the decisions, but at least we’re talking to people about pricing reductions or additions.
• “Do you believe there will be a time for a syndicated reputation service?”
  • JB: Absolutely.  Its shocking that you can’t carry your reputation with you.  Is it up to augment that?  Maybe.  But its no different than passwords.   One day we’ll walk around with a single password — and the same thing will occur with reputations.
• “Favourite or Worst Example of community impact”
  • JB: We have an active member in Montreal.  And she came upon 6 kittens that needed a home.  Someone who was a virtual friend wanted these kittens.  Members on EBay from Montreal to  New Brunswick managed to bring kittens from Montreal to New Brunswick.
  • WP: There was a kid in Florida, but he’s sick.  He probably won’t make it to 20 or 30.  He’s always sending me long emails.  But he says that the only thing that matters is that when you’re online you listen to me.  I may not live to tell my story — but come on, what tops that?
  • LM: We launched Ideastorm in February 16.  On that first day someone submitted an idea about Dell shipping with Linux which stayed the top idea for months.  What we did from there is get more information from the community.  I blogged about the survey, and in 9 days of the survey going out we had 100k respondents.  From the time we had the survey results, from the time we got that information there was 60 days to shipping out Ubuntu on Dell.  We saw a lot of interest in the US and around the world — and that’s the next thing we’re looking out for.
• “What if Michael Dell didn’t care?  Why should anyone do it?  How have you illustrated the value of building community?”
  • LM: The reality is that we still launched many of these things quickly.  We did it 4 weeks after the request for blogging came.  There were not many people who realized what we were doing when we did it.  We did encounter resistance within the company — for lots of reasons.  We’re airing dirty laundry and so on.  We were fortunate because we were launching it one way or another.  And it was a gradual process where I can show what happens when we talk about negative topics.  But what we can show is that people are happy we’re sharing information.  That we’re talking about it and the nature of having conversation carries dividends.  How do you measure it?  That’s a tough things.  But Ideastorm its great.  Its a closed loop system where we can show people how we’re getting to it.
• “How Do you illustrate to people who just don’t get it?”
  • JB: Discussions and community forums were the proxy for our initial measurements.  And what we’ve found is that people who do participate is that you’re 2-3x more valuable on the buy OR sell side.  Or, that the churn rate is 1/3 the normal user.  Its a powerful equation to demonstrate the power of community.
  • WP: Saves support, increases pageviews — its all available.  Just google “community ROI”.
• “How about Microsoft?”
  • RM: Its exactly the same — blogs, user groups — its the same.
• “Sellers can withhold feedback until they get a positive feedback — that’s changed.  Buyers are not really represented well.  What do you do to get to your real users?  Are folks that are active really representative?  Are they the norm?”
  • JB: Yeah, it drives me crazy when the feedback isn’t sent back until the transaction is completed.  But the sellers are different.  WE have a new system though that allows buyers  to give a more  colorful and full description of the seller.
• On building a community
  • WP: Community compliments all the other stuff you do — but the more you do the more it benefits you.
• On multi-lingual community
  • WP: Its a big challenge — its hard enough in one language. I am not sure if I have the answer to that problem
  • LM: From a Dell perspective, the question is how we spin into other languages.  A few months ago we released a Chinese version.  And we’ve recently released a Spanish version.  Look at all the languages in Europe — it creates a lot more departments and a lot more resources, there are no easy answers.
  • JB: There’s not a lot of play between people of different cultures and languages — its a hard thing to get it to work.
• How do you deal with community to drive things in a way that you never expected?
  • LM: The onus is on us to say that if something isn’t feasible to say why.  The worst thing is to have an idea that rises to the top and not say anything about it.  Before we launched the blog, the initiative came from Michael — to monitor the blogosphere, and match bloggers who have issues with appropriate support people.  We knew there was a lot of negativity out there.  Its that kind of homework pays off — ou can’t just jump in without knowing what’s going on.
  • JB: If we didn’t let the community decide where to take us we’d be a shadow of what we are today.  Example: eBay Motors was launched at the behest of the community.
• On Fraud:
  • JB: Our community has a vested interest to make sure things work right.  They’re on the look out to make sure about what does goes right and we’re lucky we have the size to make things go right.
• On When THings Go Bad:
  • JB: We choose to be part of the discussion.  As long as you’re transparent and fall up with issues its hard to continue to be angry.  And shame on us for being angry.
  • WP: You can kill people with being kind and transparent.
  • LM: We had a lot of negativity in the beginning and that has to be the strategy.  I’ve looked at things from the customer point of view — and they’re frustrated.  Let them vent.  Air it out.  Then start the conversation.  Reaching out diffuses the anger to solve problems.
  • WP: If you can turn negative people around they will be your most passionate supporters.  If they didn’t care they wouldn’t hang around.

Mark Relph talks to Will Pate, Jordan Banks, and Lionel Menchacha about How To Build a Community

• “Community means different things to different people — what does community to you or organization?”
  • LM: Communities can be formed around similar interests or common goals.  We look at things in terms of our customer base.  We use things like blogs ad ideastorm to build that sense of community — and give people a reason to work with and interact with Dell.
  • WP: Communities mean I can go to a conference and talk to people and do so without a badge for most of it! (laughter).  Community is those who engage with you. RE: CommandN –what it means is stories that are fed to me and Amber every day and commenting and evangelizing for us.  We all have day jobs, so we rely on our fans to do that for us.
  • JB: Community means people who have my back.  Who have my interests in mind — who want good things for me and are willing to make it happen.  Its not a very different online than off.  We think of community as people with like passions and desires who get together.  We never lose sight of who our bosses are, and they are people who use the site.
• “What about awesomeness?”
  • WP: People are attracted to things that are awesome — people will get passionate about it and get attracted to it.  That’s my theory.
• “What has been the implications does community have for your business?”
  • LM: Before we launched our community initiatives, our focus was on launching things and focusing things on how great Dell was.  It was a change where we became more customer centric — the blog and ideastorm is what its all about.  Ideastorm was launched 4 months ago, and its the combination of Digg and a messageboard.  Anyone can login and submit an idea about how we can make things better.  The voting helps decide which ideas are popular.  If we launched this tool it wasn’t going to work, and that’s why action is important.
• “Has there been an internal fight around transparency?”
  • LM: At Dell its not something we had.  Michael Dell himself has been passionate about it, and he was behind launching Ideastorm right away.  Different heads of businesses need to be aware of what’s coming through to Ideastorm and they are.
• “What about taking feedbacking and using it?”
  • JB: Its hard to hide on the Internet.  The biggest successes involve listening to the community.  The challenge involves trying to listen to disparate opinions.  The best thing to do is to acknowledge that they’ve been heard, if not acted upon, and the reasons behind it.  We fail probably more than we succeed — but at least we try and that’s important.
• “How do you *do* it?”
  • WP: A lot of companies go in and try and expect something magical to grow; figure out where your passionate users are.  They might be on blogs, facebook, or wherever.  Its important to listen to what the rules of engagement and rules of the game — listen first.  Then ask questions.
• “Is it important to own these things?”
  • WP: Its always good to have someone pushing it — like an evangelist.  Community success is probably defined about what people internally say as well.  You don’t have to be perfect — but you do have to be honest.
  • JB: At the heart of the community is passion.  And its easy to figure out what those favourites are.  Its easy to think of community as a vertical function — we tried to do that and we weren’t good with that.  Rather than having community as a vertical silent function, we now run it horizontally along the entire company, through different departments.

With Mathew Ingram, Simon Pulsifer, Jeff Howe, Michael Sikorsky

• “How do you respond criticism towards crowdsourcing?”
  • JH: I think its a false controversy. There were far fewer models back then, and there was no sharecropping taking place. I think it was first compared to child slavery and I thought this was really offensive. If the user doesn’t like the mechanical turk — but you know what? People will always get something … its not nothing. Even if its consulting, popularity, or learning their craft to exploit in their day job. Its very self-motivated. My first response is that I think its a false controversy and there IS an enormous potential for controversy. I hate “crowdsourcing” — because we love the idea that its organic and grassroots. Its up to the users whether or not they will be exploited.
• “Michael (Cambrian House), this is your business model — and you’re doing something to give back to users”
  • I think Amazon’s example of the mechanical turn is what makes sharecropping such a negative thing. We’re trying to make Cambrian house a co-op, so they get 1% of all revenue as we grow. Now there’s this AGM that happens in a different way than it ever could, and we think this is a way to get rid of the idea of digital sharecropping.
• “The articles that are agreed to be the most authoratative topic on Wikipedia seem to be the most arcane. Why do they do this?”
  • The most active Wikipedians are well educated but fairly well underemployed. Take me for example. I did it after school, and I found it enjoyable. There are other reasons — moving up the unofficial ranks of the Wikipedia community and so on.
• “Jeff Why do people do this?”
  • I don’t know. But I think we vastly underestimate the potential of People. They are more creative and more intelligent than we think they ever were. They’ve become producers rather than consumers — or prosumers. A Pew study shows that over hal –
• ** whoops … laptop meltdown … **
• Jeff Howe:
  • The biggest strengths of crowdsourcing is actually in filtering as opposed to creating content — like Digg or Cambrian House.  90% of everything is crap and that’s something that I’ve picked up as well.  It applies to crowdsourcing as well, but for the most part its not very good.  If you want osmething that’s current and what’s hot, they’re good for that.
• “If time and money wasn’t a consideration, what idea would you come up with that hasn’t been thought of?
  • JH:  Its Kiva.org — its myspace meets microlending.  You can lend people to money in Ghana to change their lives for ever so that they can set up their own businesses.  Robinhoodfund is a good example too.
• On community
  • People think that software is so magical.  But you have to have a framework up before you let the crowds in to help you
• “What’s most sustainable amongst compensation mechanisms”
  • SP: The free model has been a success.  Wikia is a profit model that is a merged model for a potential to make money off of working for Wikipedia.  Then there’ll be a question of where it will be distributed
  • JH: Should Flickr have paid money to its users when it was sold? One one side they’re there and giving there time.  On the other hand …
  • MS: Cambrian House says that if we don’t share in the rewards, we would screw up our context.
• “Can you explain the rating systems on your site?”
  • MS: Our rating system  is called “glory points”. You can attach glory points to every single activity.  What we do is take a look at what you’ve done and what you don’t do so that we can help you get more glory.  We can dynamically tune how much glory points so that you can do stuff to force serendipity.
• “Is YouTube getting sold without compensating its users wrong?”
  • JH: I don’t think so.  I mean, where do you draw the line.  Pagerank is essentially a crowdsourcing algorithm.  So all the Google is built upon that.
• “Do you have any tips on getting participation on my blog?”
  • SP: The filtering is what’s important.  90% what gets submitted isn’t useful for the wikipedia.  I don’t have an answer for the question re: alienating your audience at the expense of editing.
  • MS: Its important to have standards that are obvious
  • JH: The slashdot community is elegant and moderates itself (although its complicated)
• “How viable is it to inject a project which is a request for a build that is ‘user-generated’ — is that a viable network within an existing network”
  • MS: Absolutely.  You should be able to find a segment for a community to help you create things.
• On crowdsourcing gone bad
  • JH: The crowd decides what they want to cover and they ignored photography, so there’s no accounting for taste.  I don’t know — I don’t think you can really fix it.  This model is really in its infancy.  I think the short answer is that I don’t know.
• Are there any lines which are not OK to cross?
  • JH: That’s up to the individual.  If someone wants compensation he should ask for it and it should be given.  The line you can’t cross is at the respect to the user.  Its not that IP doesn’t exist but that its under a new regime.
• Shouldn’t community be called unpaid contributors?
  • MS: People are there *for* the community, so I think that if you try and get away from that you get away for why they’re there.  Its not about command and control, but co-ordinating and cultivating.  And that’s what makes sense for me when it comes to community.

3 developers get 5 minutes each.

Wild Apricot: Wild Apricot is a web based membership software.  The long answer is that there is many organizations, small for example, who have variable money.  They’ve built the software that sells for $12-100 on a subscription basis — it does event registration, emails, addresses — altogether.

Sneakerplay: Sneakerplay an invite only social network for urban youth who is into street culture.  It launched March last year.  We went public in September. Its a global community.  Street culture blogs gave out invites and it snowballed from there.  We got some features in the National Post and it was also in the USAToday.

Conceptshare: Conceptshare is a system that allows anyone to share a visual to get feedback.  One way we could improve an old way of doing it is marking up a common space with that visual — whether it be a web interface, ad design, or anything.    And its in one place, centralizing the discussion.