With Craigslist - www.craigslist.org - beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder

The hugely popular San Francisco-based classifieds site, which now features a Dublin site, is little more than text on a page that in Web-design terms looks straight out of 1995.

That's when the site came into being, in the early years of the Web. And the Craigslist concept hasn't changed in intervening years, making the site a true Web classic: "It's a simple site for people to find basic needs," explains Craig Newmark, the programmer/founder of the site that carries his name.

In other words, it is a form of online small ads, but with a difference. A big difference. Sure, there's job listings, house shares, books and cars and electronics for sale. But few newspaper classifieds would offer a listing for 11 Trojan-brand large-size unused condoms, free to anyone who wants to collect them, in a bag marked "Craig's List" taped to a stop sign in Seattle.

Then there's the guy offering "a free set of air drums" - "My wife says they have to go," he laments.

That's the key thing about Craigslist, says Mr Newmark - it isn't just the stuff you can get, it's the community that has formed around the site.

They help flag the spam, scams and commercial posts that sneak into the site, suggest new categories, write witty, oddball posts, and take part in discussion forums. They keep coming back to use the site - some six million unique visitors last month alone.

"I like that we're a site that speaks with a collective human voice," says Mr Newmark. He also likes words such as "democracy" and "community" - Craigslist includes a link to get Americans registered to vote.

But there's plenty of off-colour rough-and-tumble fun, too - some within the personals ads, which can be extremely blunt, and lots collected under the "best of Craigslist" link. Posts included there are voted in by community members. "We realised that we had a lot of very good posts," says Mr Newmark.

The section is a way to highlight them for the community, by the community.

The site began when Mr Newmark set up an email program to tell friends around San Francisco about various city events. He wanted to call it SF Events but friends told him to call it Craigslist to make it more personal.

Soon other people wanted to add in events as well as job ads, items for sale and apartment ads, and craigslist.org was born, enabling others to add in their listings.

Craigslist has never run an advertisement for itself, spreading to its present size - there's a Craigslist for 57 cities - entirely through word of mouth. Now there are dozens of categories, classified into eight main headings such as "jobs" and "personals".

The site, which does not divulge details of its finances, makes money by charging for job advertisements from companies and recruiters, says Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist chief executive - and even then, only for the cities of Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. And that's apparently enough to support 14 employees.

"We keep costs low and we're very efficient," says Mr Buckmaster. "And the site is largely self-managing."

Many of the employees are there to handle customer-service issues, such as scams they find on the site, or complaints about someone who hasn't paid up for an item.

Mr Newmark says customer service for such a community site is key.

The business plan may seem odd but one of the Net's big commercial success stories thinks otherwise - eBay recently became a 25 per cent shareholder when a friend of Mr Newmark decided to sell his shareholding for an undisclosed sum.

Reports indicate this isn't at all what Mr Newmark would have preferred - excepting paid job postings, he is largely corporation-free, and allows no banner ads or pop-ups - but he is sanguine about his new business partners.

There are no big plans, he insists; he's talked to eBay's senior management and he's upbeat about eBay's ability to help make Craigslist an even safer, more trustworthy community.

It has the corporate clout - and 200 dedicated employees - to go after the scammers and spammers.

And he makes no apologies for the plainness of the site.

"Way back when, I realised my strength wasn't in Web design," he laughs.

"So the homepage is probably bulkier than it needs to be but, since it's all text, it downloads really fast."

Craigslist, with 14 staff, serves up as many pages daily as Amazon.com, with 6,000 employees, says Mr Buckmaster.

The Dublin section is already beginning to fill, although Mr Buckmaster says it will take about a year for it to take off, if the site follows the usual pattern for new cities.

While we're waiting, on Craigslist Dublin right now someone in Blackrock is looking for home help, someone in California wants "classic Irish horsedrawn vehicles", and an anonymous poster from New York, writes: "Heya dubs, welcome to CL!!!!!!!! It's about f**king time!!!"