BYTE MARKS
Wave of e-mail leads Craigslist to add Honolulu to active links
By Burt Lum
When I checked CraigsList.org earlier this month, to my surprise, Honolulu showed up as an active city link.
I wrote about the site in September after my visit with founder Craig Newmark in San Francisco. Since then, Craig has been swamped with e-mails from Hawai'i asking when the Honolulu site would go live.
I am glad to say the number of postings is growing quickly.
The site has the same utilitarian look as the original San Francisco site, with its fair share of colorful contributions.
Meanwhile, I received an e-mail from James Kerr announcing his CraigsList clone, called Kimos Network.com, at www.kimosnetwork.com.
Kerr is the honcho at the Honolulu headquarters of Super Geeks, a local computer-support outfit.
Kerr said he wanted to create a community board much like the old-time message boards outside the neighborhood food market. This desire gave rise to the online version of a community message board.
If you venture over to Kimosnetwork.com, you won't find much. In fact, you won't find any listings. Unlike CraigsList.org, KimosNetwork is new. The site was supposed to launch about a year ago, at which time the site received numerous visits. But somehow, critical mass was not achieved.
Kerr took the site offline and retooled it with outsourced programming support from Indonesia. He is evaluating the best means to relaunch the site with the hope of building szstainable grassroots participation.
Don't look for big, splashy announcements or TV ads. Kerr tried that before and it didn't work. This time he's looking for direct feedback. I checked out the site and found it clean. Perhaps too clean, almost sterile.
Like the neighborhood store, there's a lot of ambience surrounding the message board.
Likewise, more character needs to be built into the site. A good example (perhaps extreme) is the Lomography.com site I wrote about back in August. An entire culture was woven around a little Russian camera.
Explore the KimosNetwork.com site and give Kimo your feedback. Let's see how viable this becomes, since Craigslist has already gotten a running start. ;-)
Reach Burt Lum at www.brouhaha.net.
