Despite building possibly the most influential and essential community and commerce website, Craig Newmark of craigslist.org isn’t living the high life.

At the first Zócalo/New America Foundation event in San Francisco, held at the Golden Gate Room in the Fort Mason Center, Newmark told the capacity crowd that he lives “pretty simply with a few luxuries,” including “a pretty good shower” and “all the gadgets I want.” With characteristic brevity and plain-talk, Newmark, who called himself the Forrest Gump of the Internet, said he does “OK, and that works out well enough.”

For Newmark, who is now a craigslist customer service representative, “well enough” means building a site that boasts upwards of 20 billion page views per month from 500 communities in 50 countries. Newmark, chatting with New America Foundation fellow Douglas McGray, explained how he built craigslist from a small listserv into a vital commerce platform, and how community-based, user-friendly sites like his can revolutionize how we do business and how we participate in political life.

A day in the life of Craig

Newmark, an engineer by training, launched craigslist as an email listserv for San Franciscans in 1995, spending most of his time handling subscriptions to the list and editing postings. “The job has probably changed a little bit since then,” McGray joked. Newmark agreed, but kept it simple as he listed off what he does each day: “I get up. I do customer service as long as it takes,” he said. “Sometimes I’ll do some blogging. I’ll do some twittering…. I’ll announce my latest bird sighting. I like to do bad bird Haiku.” In the afternoons, he said, he drops by Café Reverie in Cole Valley to “read the paper on paper,” and socialize before returning home to more customer service and a bit of TV, which he wasn’t afraid to admit he enjoys.

The craigslist creed

Though he discovered that “as a manager, I kinda suck,” the site maintains Newmark’s original vision for it. “There’s no MBA influence in the company,” he joked. Craigslist relied on slow but steady expansion by word of mouth rather than by press, a bare-bones and efficient design, and a strong sense of community. He has also kept it free from banner ads, noting in Q&A that they simply “didn’t feel right.” In the meantime, Newmark has become a bit famous – he describes a typical response to his physical presence as “disbelief [and] panic, followed by photography.” Still, he hangs onto his less-than-glamorous customer service job, complete with standard email address, craig@craigslist.org.

The entire craigslist effort, as Newmark said repeatedly, is not “noble or altruistic,” but it does follow some simple rules that Newmark picked up in part, he said, “by my rabbi, that guy Leonard Cohen”: “treat people like you want to be treated…give people a break, live and let live.” Noting his mother’s fondness for flea markets, he said, “Our site, in a way, is a flea market. It’s about commerce, but it’s also about socializing. People go to the mall for the same purpose. Years ago in Rome, people went to the forum for the same purpose. This is nothing new.”

If it is a flea market, it must be the world’s biggest and strangest. As McGray noted, the free section of craigslist sometimes boasts the most unusual items: McGray has spotted back issues of a volleyball magazine, an ad seeking to trade an executive desk for a pool table (“that seems very of-the-moment” McGray said), and a “trapoline” which, he joked, “Might be a trampoline, but extra dangerous.”

Newmark recalled another trampoline post, in which a grandmother wanted to give away a 14-foot one. “That was a sign of the times, because more and more people are getting on the net and realizing it’s not that hard to use,” he said. But his most memorable post? One user sought to hire someone to take a CPA ethics test in his place.

Attack of the spammers

Newmark admitted to making some mistakes along the way. “A lot of them have to do with not listening to the lawyers years back,” he said, noting that he tried to run things on a volunteer basis, but it failed “in part because I didn’t assert leadership.”

As customer service rep, he also runs across some of the more unpleasant postings on the site. Scammers, he said, “just won’t give up…and some of them have learned how to bypass our defenses.” And though he hopes to build his site’s anti-spam protections, he noted in Q&A that the preemptive warnings on craigslist – brief prohibitions against spamming which appear to users before they post an ad – are “possibly the most effective defense I’ve ever seen.” The site also has a mechanism that lets users flag inappropriate posts.

The political discussion boards, too, get a bit rowdy, Newmark noted. Still, he said, craigslist had “to learn to trust our community, to turn over the running of the site to the people who visit.”

Ask not what the Internet can do for you

Craigslist relies on “a culture of participation,” Newmark said. The concept is central not only to all things Web 2.0 but also, of course, to government. As McGray noted, there is something of a “new love affair” between tech and government, though the tech world has long kept its distance from politics because of what Newmark called its “Libertarian streak.”

“The net is about, in some respects, people helping each other out,” Newmark said. “Sometimes the market does that, and sometimes it’s the government.”

The Internet, Newmark emphasized, is ultimately about allowing and encouraging civic participation. More sites are using technology to increase access to government data, Newmark and McGray noted, providing raw material for users to build applications or offering more easily digestible information. Newmark noted that 311 systems in cities like San Francisco make it easier for residents to reach their local government, and organizations like the Sunlight Foundation offer up congressional bills for broad public scrutiny.

McGray mentioned that President Barack Obama once suggested building a “craigslist for service.” Newmark pointed to a few sites that do it already: VolunteerMatch, job sites like Idealist.org, and philanthropic efforts like the microfinance site Kiva, through which Newmark offers loans within the West Bank. Echoing advice he gave to anyone who wants to build community online, Newmark said that the metaphor Obama used “more generically just means, do something simple and basic that meets human needs and appeals to whatever idealism people have.”

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See more photos here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.