Here is everything you need to know about Craigslist versus old-school newspaper classified ads:

Links from an external page (other web sites except search engines)
Total: 11 different pages-url
Pages Percent Hits Percent
http://seattle.craigslist.org/sno/rfs/183371972.html 47 18.7 % 47 18.7 %
http://seattle.craigslist.org/sno/rfs/181063476.html 46 18.3 % 46 18.3 %
http://seattle.craigslist.org/sno/rfs/185142701.html 35 13.9 % 35 13.9 %
http://seattle.craigslist.org/sno/rfs/184614253.html 31 12.3 % 31 12.3 %
http://seattle.craigslist.org/sno/rfs/182216951.html 30 11.9 % 30 11.9 %
http://seattle.craigslist.org/sno/rfs/184256704.html 27 10.7 % 27 10.7 %
http://seattle.craigslist.org/sno/rfs/182529686.html 26 10.3 % 26 10.3 %
http://realestate.nwsource.com/sales/Listing.asp 4 1.5 % 4 1.5 %
http://us.f511.mail.yahoo.com/ym/ShowLetter 3 1.1 % 3 1.1 %
http://marketplace.nwsource.com/real/search.cfm 1 0.3 % 1 0.3 %
http://us.f356.mail.yahoo.com/ym/ShowLetter 1 0.3 % 1 0.3 %

I was helping a friend sell her house. To advertise and inform, I built a web page (www.tambark.com for anyone interested) and we put that web address onto the flyers we made. We also advertised the house on seattle.craigslist.com. Later, we ran an ad in the Seattle Times and Seattle P-I’s classifieds, which also comes with a longer version (pictures included) on their web site.

The numbers above show the results. I ran a total of 7 ads on Craigslist. It was basically the same ad; I just refreshed it a number of times, which is why it’s got 7 different URLs. The listing shows what pages people were looking at and clicked on a link to come to the website; there were 4 people who were apparently reading an email (probably someone emailed the web site’s URL), there were 5 people who came from the Times/PI’s online presence (that’s “nwsource.com”), and there were 242 who came from the various Craigslist ads.

Oh, and the CL stuff was free, while the Times/PI ad cost over a hundred bucks (which, to be fair, included a classified in 500,000+ copies of printed newspapers).

The return for your dollar, since CL is free, is impossible to calculate; you can’t divide by zero, you know.

The main point is that CL totally blows the Times/PI classifieds away, at least in terms of driving traffic to the web site. In real life, the Times/PI ad did bring a couple of people to the open house, but FAR more people came from the CL ad and the signs/flyers that we posted on the house and in the neighborhood.

My conclusion? If you’re going to sell something FSBO (For Sale By Owner) don’t fool around with the traditional print classifieds, at least not in the Seattle area. Go with Craigslist.

True nickname story- a guy at work, John, shared a ride to Pullman last fall. He was going to visit his kid, then come back home with the kid for holidays or something. He found the rideshare via Craigslist.

The guy who picks him up introduces himself in person as “Nick”, which is also how he called himself on the phone. But the Caller ID had a different name.

John, to make conversation somewhere outside of North Bend, asks him what the deal is with “Nick”. “Is that short for something?” he asks the guy.

“Yeah, nickname” the guy says.

John says “That’s what I’m asking, what is it short for?”

The guy says “It’s short for ‘nickname’!” And John realizes what the guy is saying- his nickname is Nick, which is short for “nickname”.

And the guy was 100% serious.

The guy also happened to believe his rig was most fuel-efficient at 95 mph. But hey, he was a nice guy- offered John some of his weed and, at one point, says “pharmaceuticals?” offering a baggie full of random pills.

Anyway, that’s my nickname story. I wish it were MY story, instead of me passing along John’s story, but it’s still a damn funny story, so I thought I’d share it with you as a little funny at the beginning of the week.

What to do now?

I understand and sympathize with same-sex couples wanting to be included in the marriage statute. And I think it’s a matter of basic fairness, and that they should be able to get it immediately, without waiting.

But it isn’t going to happen, at least not through the judicial branch of government making it happen, not in this state (and this is one of the more liberal states in the nation).

So. What do we do now?

In The Art of War, Sun-tzu said that the army values victory, not protracted fight. The ancient Chinese text, used and taught by armies around the world for thousands of years, stresses getting into battles that you can win- in fact, the suggestion throughout the text is that the vast majority of battles are won before they’re ever fought. I believe that we (those of us who think that same-sex marriage is, at present, unattainable) must recognize this and retract, regroup, and re-engage in a battle that we can win.

The issue of basic fairness being our strongest issue, we must build upon this. We must recognize that as long as we’re stuck on the word “marriage”, we’re going to lose… therefore, we must ask ourselves: What do we really want?

While the word “marriage” sums up what we want, we can also look at the concept in its component parts. For example, we want the surviving member of a same-sex couple to, after the partner’s death, to be able to inherit the property that the couple jointly acquired. We want people to treat the partners with courtesy and respect. We want someone to be considered “family” or “next of kin” in situations where someone is incapacitated in the hospital. We want people to recognize and value the relationship that exists.

Some of these things are dictated by society through government, and can be changed by changing the law. Some of them are dictated by people’s attitudes, and can only be changed by changing people’s minds and hearts.

My belief is that we are slowly but surely changing people’s minds and hearts. Surveys show that the younger someone is, the more likely they are to view homosexuals in a neutral or favorable manner; the more likely they are to support, or at least not oppose, same-sex marriage; the more likely they are to have gay friends, and so forth.

But this is an evolutionary change, and thus will continue to take time.

The things that are dictated by society through government, though, we can probably make gains on. The answer, I believe, is “civil unions”. Shakespeare said that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet; well, so will marriage.

We must start making small, incremental, winnable changes in the law. We must be contrite and say “okay, we aren’t going to get same-sex marriage, but how about civil unions?” We should stay away from the notion of children; as much as I know that hurts, we must win where we can, retrench and rebuild and not fight where we can’t win… yet.

So. What do we do now? We pull back a bit, we regroup, and then we come back out with a battle plan that gets us some victories. We have laid some groundwork; the battle we just fought (and lost) isn’t wasted, but we still need to find one we can win.

We need to focus not on same-sex marriage, but on civil unions that provide the same types of things (legally) that we want in the “marriage” concept. We can call it “marriage” all we want among ourselves; we know what it means. Anyone who knows any homosexual couples that’ve had their own “marriage”, or commitment ceremony, or whatever you want to call it, knows perfectly well that homosexuals are just as capable of that long-term, dedicated, loving relationship as straight people are.

So that’s what I think we need to do- focus on getting what we actually want, even if we don’t wind up calling it “marriage”.