Craig's List has been in the news frequently the previous few weeks. eBAY's purchase of 25% of the company a few weeks ago prompted most of the news. And today in THE NEW YORK TIMES business section there is a profile of the company.

A bit of history: Back in 1999 our company (then named internet.com Corporation), was buying dozens of Web sites of varying sizes. One that we really wanted was Craig's List. I had many discussions with Craig and Jim, but could not shake them to sell. We even discussed a partial ownership position, but again, nothing doing.

At that time Craig's List was essentially focused on San Francisco and Silicon Valley and we were building a variety of news bureaus for internetnews.com in New York City, Boston, Atlanta, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago,Toronto, Berlin, London, Milan, Amsterdam, Singapore, Hong Kong, Beijing, Taipei and Sydney (with many more planned). I had wanted to combine Craig's List with each of our news bureaus --- apparently a good idea! But as stated above, I was rebuffed.

Craig and Jim said they were going to build out Craig's List to dozens of cities and I was incredulous that they could pull it off. History shows they did it in spades and they did it with great class. History also shows that we built an excellent news organization at internetnews.com, although we now have bureaus only in New York City, Boston and San Francisco, Berlin and Tokyo.

Craig's List combines community and ecommerce. The Internet is littered with failed ecommerce sites that lacked community and community sites that could not garner ecommerce. It looks to be an easy combination to master, but history says otherwise.

Congratulations to these two gentlemen --- great job and congratulations.