Feb 18 2007
Buggerall – Australian Blogs’ Craigslist
In a recent post about Australian blog hosts and blog search, I mentioned Australianblogs which was redirecting to Buggerall.
Well, Buggerall have released their latest concept in Australian community search – a place where users can add not only blogs and websites, but an assortment of classifieds notices, such as an event, personals, for sale, jobs etc. Listings are created with a spot for a description, URL and item and location tags. These tags are the means by which items are searched.
Note the heading “Welcome to BuggerAll.com.au – the AustralianBlogs’ craigslist”.
One thing concerns me regarding the functionality of the site. Whilst users need to enter an email address when adding a listing, there is no registration required. This is both a positive (from a user perspective), but also a negative. It opens up the potential for malicious entries e.g. “for a good time phone…. (insert ex-girlfriend’s number)”, not to mention listings for XXX rated sites.
Not requiring to sign in means that once submitted you loose control over the listing (i.e. it doesn’t appear that you can easily edit or delete a listing), so once you’ve found a new flatmate, or the perfect employee, how do you cancel the ad? It could lead to stale listings and an administrative nightmare for the website owners…
I do like the concept, just think there’s a few issues that need to be sorted.
2 Responses to “Buggerall – Australian Blogs’ Craigslist”
Meg,
You must have the blog equivalent of legendary Pakistani cricket umpire Shakoor Rana’s trigger-finger. I reckon you’ve got trip wires setup around your rss aggregator!
Anyway, thanks again for the plug. My wife might get suspicious with the amount of link love you show my flea market stall of a web portfolio.
You’re absolutely right about the login/listing shelf life issue. We’re breaking new ground from AustralianBlogs’ perspective and will have to see how this is handled by the user community first before coming up with a longer-term (hopefully sustainable) solution.
With the dodgy listings, users will have a ‘flag for review’ function which then passes the listing to our small team of human reviewers. This may act as some sort of community constabulary.
I’m kinda proud of my weekend project – this multi-dimensional model of data was something I have been tinkering with for a while i.e. Search using:
– Type (eg. blog, forsale, event, localnews….etc); and/or
– Locality tag; and/or
– Keyword tag
eg. give me all ‘Events’ in ‘Sydney’ for ‘Web’
I can die in peace now, until the next project…
Hi Jon
ROFL! Now she might get suspicious if I was ALL positive, but at least I was being objective….
I agree that you should be proud – it’s a good concept & I hope it kicks for you.
Could you consider an “expiry date” field on each item (which delivers a calendar), with the option of a “never” button for permanent listings perhaps? Or is that over complicating the system?
I can see that the “flag for review” option may well suffice for the dodgy listings, and outweigh the necessity to have to sign up.
I look forward to the next project…. you can read about it here 😉