This week is going to be especially craigslist-heavy because I've decided to spend some time on the site's supplementary features. This urge to dive into craigslist's extraneous tendrils came about when the site updated its look. Really, "updated" isn't the right word. Google-fied is more like it. See, while most businesses make their interactive components, be they websites, storefronts or products, slicker and more visually appealing over time, Google has taken the opposite tack. As evidenced by the most recent dress-down of Gmail, Google is on a mission to make everything look like a slapped-together website from the earliest days of the Internet, that scrappy era before the invention of clip art or custom backgrounds. The new Gmail just looks like someone stole a bunch of features off the old Gmail, but apparently it takes up less space and stresses Google's servers a little less. Whatever, it's free and reliable. The craigslist update is another thing altogether. The old page, which was already as sparse as possible, seems to have been needlessly crunched into a smaller column with blank space on either side. This is either the prep work for a List with ads on the side or some kind of chicanery to make the site more mobile-app-friendly. Regardless, the tighter quarters forced me to rub eyeballs with some of those links on the margins, leading me to such items as the craigslist Youtube channel (also connected to a Twitter feed in some kind of terrifying Internet trifecta) and the craigslist blog.

A couple weeks ago we spent some time with Jim Buckmaster, craigslist CEO and all-around hyper-defensive guy, when he published an essay on CNN.com about how safe and forward-thinking craigslist is. Popping over to the CL blog, it quickly becomes apparent that Buckmaster does stuff like this all the time. Every two weeks on average, Buckmaster posts an essay on the blog that is a reiteration of the content of his CNN article, or some other item that aggrandizes or defends the List. Buckmaster's favorite pastime is to have slap fights with bored politicians who take aim at craigslist's less (or rather least) savory components. I've got my fingers crossed that Buckmaster will one day sue me for defamation. Think of the site traffic! After all, no politician actually believes he'll win a case in which the issue of free speech is involved. It's been quite a long time since anyone picked up a real victory against the First Amendment. It's almost like these politicians are trying to generate publicity for the sole purpose of increased name recognition come the next election. Well done, Jim. You're helping more right-wingers get into office.

Buckmaster also loves posting other people's success stories, implying that craigslist makes incredible things possible. Yes, it is rather amazing that a teenage boy used his bartering savvy to trade an old cell phone up to an old Porsche in just... wait, it took him two whole years? And he actually traded down in some cases? And some of the trades required additional labor and all of them required hours upon hours of research every single day? Why, it's almost like the realities of perceived value and depreciation hold true even on the Internet! Buckmaster doesn't so much as gloss over the fact that phone-to-Porsche trader Steven Ortiz could have afforded said Porsche with actual currency if he had just gotten a job and worked for those two years instead of leapfrogging between labor-intensive trades. But that's the nature of the List. It harbors not so many lies as misdirections.

Later this week we'll dive into Craigslist TV, the List's Youtube channel. Not to spoil anything, but it's mostly populated with unbelievable and possibly fake characters doing ill-advised things.