SFist Nick forwarded along an unintentionally-hilarious article by professional provocateur Christopher Hitchens from earlier this week in Slate. In this article, Hitchens mostly complains about Conrad Black, the Canadian press tycoon recently convicted of corporate fraud, but check out this kicker at the end! more ›

Sad as it may seem, a great deal of joy comes into of our lives by browsing missed connections. While we like to say that it is simply good clean fun to see people's hearts and thoughts scattering across what might have been, the fact remains that we are just just hoping someone writes about us (Cute? At Trader Joe's? Buying Pasta? That could be us!). Despite the smatterings of missed connection success stories that we have heard, we remain a little doubtful that their true "connection" rate is anything above the Mendoza Line. This same view is often expressed on Craigslist. Amusingly, it is generally posted in Missed Connections itself. more ›

Arrrgggghhh. Sometimes that is the one reasonable response to what people write about Craigslist. Of course we realize that due to network effects Craigslist will reach a critical mass in a city and that those cities will then be transformed. We also know that along the way the people involved with Craigslist, the posters, responders, discussion forum arguers, will touch many lives and be used by many different people. However, what we can't stand is that any time this happens a few writers, bloggers, media members and journalists will write about it as if it is the first time and no one has ever written about it before. more ›

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We're generally not one to sneer at anything Craigslist related, but oftentimes the "discussion" (if anyone can really call it that), which occurs on Craigslist's discussion forums look more like the redundant, back and forth of 3-year olds fighting over a toy. Don't get us wrong; there are some forum conversations which actually contain information. Just not most of them. more ›

One of the more amazing facts about Bay Area Craigslist is its complete ubiquity. It is almost to the point where you can't live your life with it. How do people find rentals? Craiglist. How do people shop for goods? Craigslist. In other words, we have it pretty gosh-darn nice here. We don't need to search multiple web sites to find apartments, nor do we need to look at newspaper classifieds to find used bicycles. Instead we have a single omnipresent source (with a nice search engine to boot!) which does all of this for us. The rest of the world is not so lucky. Let's say that, for some crazy, crazy reason, you are looking for housing in Los Angeles. Despite the fact that LA has many times the population of San Francisco, it only has half the housing listings that the Bay Area does. Or, hypothetically speaking, lets say we wanted to find a pick-up soccer game in San Diego. Ugh. There are a third as many community listings in San Diego as there are in the Bay Area, despite the fact that they have roughly the same population. Or say you want to do anything in Pittsburgh, PA, St. Louis, MO or Tampa, FL? Well, you are out of luck finding it on Craigslist. To put this in perspective, only one of the top 10 city areas in the country (New York) has more listings than the Bay Area. Wow. SFist Nick, contributing. All numbers, ratios, etc. were computed 04/09/2006. Image from artoftravelworldwide.com more ›

things which were happening in the Craigslist world. First, Craigslist was used to catch prostitutes and to find stolen cameras. Of course we can always find a few more not-so-nice things to say regarding Craigslist being sued too. more ›

We here at SFist don't have that much bad to say about Craigslist. We've found housing, bought and sold things which we never thought possible and maybe even watched a movie about it. Yet, sometimes the dark underbelly of Craigslist rears its ugly head high enough so that it punctures the little dream clouds we are floating on. more ›

Even here at SFist there can be times when a lull in our social lives has us humming "Another Saturday night and I ain't got nobody." Luckily, Craigslist is here to save the day. Just a quick sampling gives us an early morning run, learning to ride a motorcycle, climbing, b-ball,, soccer, or maybe earning some karma points. And just in case you need space for that quick game of bridge, Craiglist can come to the rescue. If you don't mind doing a little more legwork then browsing some of the forums or the event calendar can oftentimes have amazing results.

Picture from columbia.edu. SFist Nick, contributing. more ›

Craigslist trollers, such as us, oftentimes wonder how much thought goes into these values. For some goods, such as cars and baseball cards there are places to get rough estimates. But what about other goods? How does one tell which scary doll is $150 dollars, $1 dollar or $250 dollars? more ›

We're starting an occasional feature on Craigslist culture. Everyone welcome SFist Nick! One of the best things about Craigslist, other than its amazing ability to waste our time, is that it shows us that whole beauty is in the eye of the beholder thing. For example, at first glance, the picture to right doesn't really show that much. It turns out however, that the contents of that picture are worth roughly $110,000 (OBO). For a parking place! Granted, we have not yet gone down to see this actual space. There could be valet parking, everyday car washes and some of those neato RV hookups usually reserved for campgrounds, all of which could inflate the price. Then again, we're probably just a little old fashioned and this is the new world order.