re: Craigslist
Sheesh! You took our September cover story criticizing craigslist awfully personally, and you quickly leapt to the site's defense. "It rocks," wrote one online commenter who used craigslist to unload the material accumulation of a lifetime. "It reminds me of a natural wonder, like the Grand Canyon — awesome, vast, unchanging," rhapsodized another. Who cares if we want to give the site an overhaul? (We still use it plenty ourselves; see chart, below.) Good news for site founder Craig Newmark: If he ever needs a new kidney, he has nothing to worry about. The crowd is out there, ready to oblige.
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A List Apart
Craigslist might be a mess, but it's a beautiful mess ("The Tragedy of Craigslist," issue 17.09). Peer-controlled, lots of fascinating cheap finds, human drama, no annoying pop-ups, no processor-sucking Java, no stupid videos of dogs farting — I love it.
Excerpted from a comment posted on Wired.com by STEVIE_Z
Gary Wolf's article runs counter to Wired's own founding philosophy. In his now classic work New Rules for a New Economy, your former executive editor Kevin Kelly stressed the importance of allowing the network to evolve its own logic. Isn't that what Craig Newmark has done — very successfully? He gives power to the people, not to the technocrats, and the people respond by rewarding him with increased loyalty. Don't forget your roots, Wired.
__Aaron P. Donsky
San Francisco, California__
The redesign by the NYTimes.com team is almost exactly how I would redesign the site as well. Craigslist is currently a paragon of bad design, layout, and usability. I have no idea how it remains so successful — probably just because it got there first. Someone needs to finally make a worthwhile competitor.
Excerpted from a comment posted on Subtraction.com by INFERNOCLOUD
Thank you for your profile of craigslist. It cemented for me exactly what it is we love about the site: a stubborn refusal to knuckle under to the wave of complicating and "socializing" media. It's a strong example of what capitalism can be. I commend Newmark and company for standing out by quietly doing what they do best. Imagine how different the world would be if our largest corporations were so humble.
__Chelsea Lynn
Crystal Lake, Illinois__
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Crowdsourcing
Each month we stick a pithy phrase somewhere on the cover. We call it the jingo, and it's supposed to sum up the issue. In September, we tagged our piece on craigslist with the words "It's classified." But we also invited readers to improve on our effort. Notable entries included "Listless," "Declassified," "$4.95/issue O.B.O." and, curiously yet appealingly, "Fail whale free." The winning entry, from Jim Camenga of Byron Center, Michigan: "Ad hoc." Thanks for playing!
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Re: What's Inside : Slim Jim, Issue 17.09
Some things are not meant to be known! Shame on you, Wired!
Excerpted from a comment posted on Wired.com by SLIPKID35
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Lost and Found
How hard is it to simply disappear? After publishing "Gone" (issue 17.09), about people's attempts to shed their identity in the Internet age, author Evan Ratliff decided to find out. When the issue hit newsstands on August 15, he was gone. wired offered $5,000 to anyone who could find him by September 15. If he managed to stay out of sight, Ratliff would earn $3,000.
To approximate the conditions of an actual manhunt, Ratliff's editor, Nicholas Thompson, posted Ratliff's credit card transactions, IP traffic, airline travel, and other data on Wired.com. An ever-expanding team of hunters scoured the evidence, deducing that Ratliff had crossed a bridge in Northern California, sold his car in Las Vegas, and enjoyed a soccer match in Salt Lake City. Hunters gathered on Twitter and Facebook and in invite-only Internet chat rooms.
On September 8, with a week to go, Ratliff was nabbed by Jeff Leach, the owner of a New Orleans pizzeria — thanks largely to some IP address sleuthing by Seattle's Jeff Reifman. The full story of how Ratliff went MIA — and how he was hunted down — will appear in the December issue.
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Enough Is Enough
Rather than running "The Tragedy of Craigslist" and "The Good Enough Revolution" as separate articles in the September issue, you should have just included craigslist as a shining example of Good Enough technology.
__Phil Lelyveld
Culver City, California__
I wanted to read the entire "Good Enough" article, but I skimmed the first page, got the general idea, and that was good enough.
__Taylor Smith
Edmonton, Alberta__
I'm surprised that the article didn't mention Blu-ray. For 95 percent of movies, regular DVDs are "good enough."
__Carl Walther
Florissant, Missouri__
I loved your article on the lo-def revolution. As a confessed Lego junkie, I've got to ask, where did you get the A-10 Lego model on page 119 of the article? More to the point, how do I get one? That is one of the coolest sets I've ever seen. Kudos to your builder.
__Gray Hancock
Houston, Texas__
The A-10 Thunderbolt II was made for Wired by artist Michael Psiaki of Nashua, New Hampshire. Prior to building the plane with Lego blocks, he designed a 3-D model using CAD software. You can see more Lego awesomeness at tinyurl.com/cool-legos.
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Alternative Medicine
Congratulations to Steve Silberman for an important and extremely well-written article ("The Placebo Problem," issue 17.09). Scientists have long known that faith in a course of treatment is itself a curative agent for problems like depression. But this doesn't have to mean faith in a pill. We could instead promote belief in the health benefits of exercise, friendship, love, community, talk therapy, spirituality, and political activism.
__Bruce E. Levine
Cincinnati, Ohio__
This was a great article, but it overlooked the implications for other industries that sell remedies to the ill. Claims about the effectiveness of alternative therapies and nutritional supplements are also rendered suspect by the placebo effect, especially when one considers the tremendous amount of ritual and faith involved in their delivery.
Excerpted from a comment posted on Wired.com by DRICHES
I use the placebo response almost daily with my kids — a kiss to the injured area, maybe a baggie of ice, and off they go, 100 percent healed.
Excerpted from a comment posted on Wired.com by SYPHAX
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Mesozoic Mistake
"Grow-a-Nanoraptor" (Found, issue 17.09) is cleverly put together, but the actual image of the raptor is appalling. It's now widely accepted that some dinosaurs were ancestors of birds; a velociraptor would be more similar to a large chicken than a lanky reptile. While clever, your artifact from the future is in fact an image out of the past.
__Nick Rahme
Haslett, Michigan__
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Thar Be Unicorns
I was disappointed to not see Richard Adams Locke's masterful series of newspaper articles from 1835, "Great Astronomical Discoveries," in the pantheon of great hoaxes ("The Official Prankonomy," issue 17.09). For months, Locke duped the literate Western world into believing there were man-bats, unicorns, and upright beavers inhabiting the moon. Surely, a prank par excellence.
__Adam Richard Rottinghaus
Chapel Hill, North Carolina__
