I admit it. I'm a Craigslist addict. Like thousands of other people, I turn to Craigslist almost daily instead of heading to the local shopping mall. It's kind of like Grocery Gateway without the guilt of home delivery; or like shopping on Amazon but knowing that you're part of a community of people committed to not buying something new if you can find it second hand.

Craigslist in their own words is "Local classifieds and forums for 450 cities worldwide - community moderated, and largely free." Basically, you can buy and sell almost anything, locally, for free. Craiglist is a "non-corporate" corporation that earns revenue by "charging below-market fees for job ads in 7 cities and for broker apartment listings in NYC." The founder -- Craig Newmark -- is a committed philanthropist and set up the Craigslist Foundation in 2001, which helps to develop the skills of emerging non-profit leaders.

Last year I wrote a bit about the implication of "The Syndicated Web" for non-profits and mentioned the use of services like Craigslist as a simple way to push useful information out to a community, e.g., job ads, free stuff, volunteer opportunities, etc. This year I was lucky enough to be able to help a few organizations implement some of these ideas ... but, alas, that's another post. Right now, we're talking about my personal Craigslist addiction! ;-)

Reducing my footprint

This year started with a renewed commitment to not buying new "stuff" where possible. Short of dumpster diving, I'm game for putting in some extra effort (and delaying the instant gratification of an impulse purchase) to find something previously owned before heading to the mall, or online shop. Unfortunately, this takes a lot more time than just giving in to the urge to buy something new. For starters, there's less selection, and often the selection is limited not only to the "last season's" styles ... but, more often than not, it's limited to the last generation's styles. Also, as someone that's chronically over-committed, the idea of bouncing around every weekend to the local second-hand shops -- basically the regiment required to find good stuff -- is not that exciting to me.

I admit that at a certain point I just give up in the scenario of a never-ending search for something you actually need. As an example, after six months of searching for a suitable previously-owned dining room table, Melanie and I just gave up and purchased one new. Hopefully we'll have it for 20 years and then pass it on to some other owners and that's still a-ok in my books. But, it did leave me thinking: I need a better way to search for previously-owned stuff! A way that would hopefully let me search for more of the things we need, but require less time and travel.

Enter the "Craigslist dashboard."

Craigslist dashboard: step-by-step

So, being dedicated to re-use yourself, I'm sure you're asking: How can I get a Craigslist dashboard of my own? Well, here's what worked for me:

• First, I sat down with my partner Melanie and created a list of things that we were hoping to find for our apartment, e.g., a full-length mirror, bookshelves, etc.
• Then I visited my local Craigslist and searched for each of those items; (Here's a search for "bookcase" on the Toronto Craigslist.)
• After reviewing the results of my search, I usually refined the search a bit further to better target what we were looking for;
• At that point, I'd scroll down to the bottom of the results screen and find the newsfeed (RSS) link.

Now, at this point, you'll need to think about what you want to build your Craigslist dashboard on. Many folks already have a favourite newsfeed reader -- like Bloglines, or NetNewsWire, etc. -- and I suspect anything would work just fine. Personally, because I just wanted headlines, and I wanted to see them frequently, I used my Google Personalized Homepage. The next steps were:

• I created a new tab on my Google Personalized Homepage for "Tracking;"
• Then I added all of the newsfeed / rss links from those Craigslist searches to my tracking page
• Finally, I adjusted the number of items per feed based on how frequently they update, e.g., "bicycles" has a lot of posts every day so I wanted to see more headlines... whereas "turntable" gets relatively few results so it makes sense to see less at a time.

And, Voila! There you have it: a Craigslist dashboard.

I implemented the dashboard in January and since then I've managed to help several nice people find a new home for their "stuff." I've also spent less time out there looking for things we need for our home. And, last but not least, I can feel good about supporting a local re-use economy and keeping my money working hard right here in Toronto. I've never felt so good about consuming in my life -- Go ahead, become addicted!

It is hard to believe that it’s months into 2006 already — it seems like 2005 was just a blip on a very large radar screen.

Last June, I was working with my colleagues at Communicopia.Net to support the International Development Research Centre’s (IDRC) recently launched telecentre.org initiative. At the time, our colleague Mark Surman was working hard to document a vision of a global network of telecentres (anything from an Internet café in Nairobi to an ICT training centre in India) that could share information freely and fluidly.

As we discussed the design challenges around supporting this kind of information ecosystem — challenges that were both technical and political — we sketched out an idea that was roughly “the opposite of a portal:” something that keeps the information flowing at the edges of the network.

This is a challenge faced by many of the “network organizations” that I’ve worked with. Often these network organizations are small non-profits like the Sustainability Network that provide information, learning opportunities, and management support to hundreds of member organizations that work on a specific issue, like the environment, poverty, or employment. A lot of what these organizations do naturally is aggregate ideas, papers, reports, and events and syndicate them out to their members (often via e-mail or paper-based newsletter).

In the process of thinking about the challenges faced by IDRC’s global network, I put together a list of online tools that I’ve been excited about. Mostly I’ve been excited about their potential to help address the challenges of transferring knowledge across networks and to provide simple solutions to common challenges.

Not wanting to bore folks with the complete list, I’ll just highlight a few of the key themes here:

Really Simple Syndication

Often referred to as RSS, this simple data standard allows organizations to send or receive “feeds” of information. These feeds can be displayed on a Web site or read in special RSS readers. Not wanting to cover a topic that many have already, I’ll just point you to the article “10 Reasons Nonprofits Should Use RSS” for more information.

I’m not that excited by the technology itself — or even the often-lauded reasons why non-profits should embrace it — but I am excited by what I see as some potential uses of it...

• Many of the free services like Craigslist and Ebay’s new Kijiji offer RSS feeds of very specific information like jobs of a certain kind or in a certain area or free offerings like furniture. I can’t help but feel that uses these services to provide very frequently updated listings of information relevant to a client group — like new Canadians or youth looking for work — would be one opportunity to explore.
• Add to that that ability to deliver these listings over the phone, using free software that would read the RSS feeds, and an organization could provide automatically updated information for clients without Internet access.

Social bookmarking

Really kicked off this year through the success of services like del.icio.us, Furl, Spurl, and the new (fancy) ma.gnolia.com — social bookmarking aims to make those old-and-tired Web pages that you’ve saved useful again. The basic idea is to save those “Bookmarks” and “Favourites” online where they can be shared with your colleagues. Add to that the ability to “Tag” — or quickly categorize with simple keywords — those saved bookmarks and suddenly you’re on to something. Go one-step further and use RSS to publish these bookmarks to a Web site for your members and you’re really cooking.

If you’d like to read more about social bookmarking, please have a look at the article “Social Bookmarking Tool Comparison” on Consultant Commons.

Again, here are some practical ideas on how progressive organizations could actually use simple, free, tools like these in real life:

• Shared bookmarks in a youth employment centre could help to keep job development staff coordinated with the latest resources and helpful sites for job skills, search, and training. The bookmarks could then be published to the Centre’s Web site or sent to clients on a regular basis via e-mail
• For organizations working on legislative or legal issues, social bookmarking can be a way for a team to collect and organize a large number of Web-based resources, such as references to specific passages from the Debates of the Senate (Hansard) or media and press coverage of an issue. Already, folks are creating feeds of House of Commons Committee happenings that allow you to follow (and publish) information that may effect your organization or clients.

Syndicated search

Finally, and probably the most significant, is syndicated search. Lead by services like Google and Yahoo! Alerts, PubSub, and Technorati, it is now possible to “search the future” as Kris Krug put it at this year’s Web of Change gathering. In reality, that means that you can create a search query that is executed in real time, constantly. Then, as results come in, they can be syndicated — or published — onto a Web site or delivered via e-mail. Think about it: you can get notified of new search results on something important to your organization (like mentions in the media, or new legislation, etc.) without having to lift a finger!

Some possible uses of syndication search would be:

• To automatically track certain issues in the media and deliver them to member organizations via e-mail or the Web
• To keep information on an organization's Web site fresh with constantly updated and highly-targeted information that is published instantly via an RSS feed

Finally, with tools like RSS Mix and Feed Digest you can “re-mix” all of this information in interesting ways. For example, the BBC’s Backstage allows people to take information that is published by the BBC and extend it with new functionality. For some inspiration, just take a look at some of the examples of what some bright people are doing with these simple tools.

Have ideas and examples of your own — why not share a few here?