Craigslist blocks Oodle
Craigslist, the online classifieds company that is big in the Bay Area and elsewhere, had told Oodle that it can no longer take Craiglist’s listings for inclusion in its site.
As search engine expert John Battelle points out, he’d wondered if the sources of Oodle’s listings would ever get cranky (Oodle, a start-up based in San Mateo, “scrapes” classified listings all over the web, then creates a search engine for those classifieds). We’d had the same thought, but for some reason Craigslist had seemed patient with these sorts of things. Remember, there have been numerous mashups, including the Housing Maps one, where author Paul Rademacher had reported he’d gotten Craigslist’s tacit permission to use its housing listings. But Rademacher always made clear he wasn’t doing it for the money.
Anyway, there’s a bit of sturm and drang over the the Oodle blog (see comments), where people are clearly fired up. Craig Newmark, of Craigslist, has responded to one rather nasty criticism.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
