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Posting will be light in the next coming days as I try to tend to a family emergency. Thank you for your patience.

Gumtree gives up on dating AND casual sex:

The e-Bay owned British classified site Gumtree is closing its version of personals and casual encounters sections due to customer complaints. Their users say that there are no legitimate people behind the ads. Well duh.

Now only if the people who used craigslist’s casual encounters section would smarten up.

Gesture of Economic Goodwill Pushes Geebo.com Beyond Competition:

My good friend Greg Collier of Geebo.com released the following press release today announcing that to help out in the questionable economy he is allowing the placement of employment ads for free in the month of May of 2009.

See Geebo.com or the press release for details.

Once again I have no personal stake in Geebo.

Craigslist rival uses Twitter to expose dangers of CL’s red-light district:

This is a great article about how Geebo.com CEO Greg Collier is using twitter to call out craigslist founder Craig Newmark to clean up craigslist’s act.

Anyone else might take this opportunity to promote their own site as being safer, more reputable, more controlled, perhaps. But none of Collier’s tweets make any mention of his site – geebo.com. He insists that he’s not doing this to promote his own site, nor is he being obsessive about craig-bashing. But there’s bad stuff happening on the site – from prostitution to housing scams – and that needs to stop, he said. When the news stories appear – and that seems to be happening more frequently now – he feels the need to point them out.

If you want to follow Greg on twitter he’s @gregcollier.

Again in the interest of transparency I have no stake in Geebo.com. I just believe in Geebo as a craigslist alternative.

Clean content selling point for Web classifieds:

Tired of the filth and perversion of craigslist. Why not give ChosenList.com a try.

ChosenList was started by Cary Peters and Dwaine Canova as a clean alternative to craigslist.

And they started with an ingenious idea to keep the site clean…

“The first way we filter out that content is by not having the category,” Peters said. “If you don’t have an erotic services section, 99 percent of that is not going to get posted.”

Who would have thought that by not having an erotic services section on a classifieds site would cut down on the criminal element?

I’ve checked out ChosenList and it’s a lot better looking and easier to navigate than craigslist and doesn’t look like a Geocities reject site from 1998. They also have video ads which is a really nice touch.

ChosenList.com gets the highly touted Trench Reynolds seal of approval.

Ever since I posted about the CEO of Geebo.com throwing down the gauntlet at craigslist I’ve been meaning to do a review of the site. Well, here it is.

Right of the bat the front page of geebo is a lot more pleasing than craigslist’s straight out of 1995 start page. Geebo is way more organized and clean than craigslist could ever hope to be. I’m all for minimalism in web design but craigslist just looks like crap while geebo looks very sleek and clean.

I was impressed by the lack of crap on geebo. The personal ads seemed to be legit and smut free. The ads for merchandise for sale also didn’t seem like the leery ads on craigslist.

The only thing I don’t like about geebo is the fact that you don’t have to sign up for a membership to use geebo. As I’ve stated before, craigslist biggest problem is the anonymity they allow their users. However with that said I e-mailed Greg Collier, CEO of geebo, and this is what he had to say when I asked him if he thinks that would be a problem…

We monitor every listing so if something forbidden gets through, it is usually yanked within a matter of 1-2 minutes, or less. Once the posting is removed we immediately block their IP address, notify them that they have violated geebo’s terms of use, and watch to see if they continue this behavior from another ip address, blocking those as well. Eventually, they move on once they discover that their postings are not sticking”.

Wow, a website that is proactive about criminal activity rather than reactive. What a novel concept.

Geebo gets the highly vaunted Trench Reynolds Seal of Approval (bark bark).

I received the following e-mail from Greg Collier, CEO of Geebo.com. He seems to have taken a stance on safety and has thrown the gauntlet down at craigslist.

A Call to Action: Make Web Sites Safer!

Check fraud, identity theft, rights infringement, prostitution, child exploitation, property theft, escrow fraud all are daily occurrences on the Internet. Several incidents have become the stuff of urban legend. The man in Oregon who came home to find his belongings gone thanks to a Craigslist ad. The woman who in January posted an ad to hire a hit man. Or take your pick of dozens of sting operation stories involving various types of crimes. In February 2008, sting operations took place in Melbourne FL, Lenexa KS, Wayne County MI, Portland OR, Mt. Juliet TN, and more.

Relevant facts:

·Most Internet crimes are not reported in the media. Most are probably not reported to the FBI either, yet FBI reports of Internet crimes reached the 1-million mark in mid-2007.

·Some Internet crimes are made easier by the practices of certain sites.

Take, for example, the erotic services category on Craigslist. Seattle police and many other law enforcement agencies have had no trouble demonstrating that this section has promoted prostitution. Information Week reports that Craigslist management claims to be taking steps to reduce that particular type of illegal activity on the site, but a quick perusal of the site’s personal, erotic and therapeutic services categories suggests otherwise.

·Where to look: On any city’s version of Craigslist, you’ll find ‘erotic’ just seven lines below ‘sporting’ (the spot where your teen might look for a used kayak).

·Craigslist crimes are becoming so rampant that web sites and blogs are springing up to track them, including crimene.ws.

·Some may call Craigslist prostitution ads ‘victimless’ crimes, but who’s to say that since ads for illegal activity appear here in plain sight, criminals may be attracted to this site and may then move on to other categories where it would be relatively easy to prey on innocent people looking for a job or apartment? In October 2007, 24 yr-old Minnesota resident, Katherine Ann Olson, responded to a Craigslist ad for a nanny and was killed by the man who posted it. Others have been physically assaulted.

Craigslist staff have been quoted as saying that the site is simply too big to monitor. While that might be a significant part of the problem, other sites, large and small, are managing to take such steps. In fact, many sites (PayPal, banking sites, investment sites, and more) would not be able to stay in business if they did not successfully monitor for potential criminal activity.

To prove this is not impossible in the realm of community buying a selling, take a look at Geebo.com, a community site that works much like Craigslist with the important difference being that it is regularly monitored. While both community sites have grown from one to many cities (and both started in northern California), Geebo has a physical presence in many of those cities, and it uses both technological tools and staffing to spot and remove scams and other crimes.

“We can often detect illegal activity pretty easily,” says Geebo CEO, Greg Collier. “Not only can we trace suspicious ads, we actually read the ads on our site, the free postings included. We’re committed to continuing this practice, no matter how big we get. We’ve seen enough of these schemes to be able to spot fraud that our visitors wouldn’t be able to spot for themselves. We want our site to be as safe as we can make it.” Collier would like to see more site owners take action to protect their visitors.

More information:

Where to report Internet fraud: http://www.fbi.gov/page2/april08/ic3_report040308.html

Where to get more info on predators: http://www.fbi.gov/innocent.htm

Types of scams: http://www.lookstoogoodtobetrue.com/stories.aspx

Safety tips for teens: http://72.32.1.50/ (including information on how to report suspicious activity to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children)

FBI Guide to Internet safety: http://www.fbi.gov/publications/pguide/pguidee.htm

Those are some bold statements but it’s nothing I disagree with.

I haven’t gotten knee deep into Geebo yet but I hope to have a review up this weekend. From what little I saw so far it was fairly impressive.