Seattle's craigslist site is a busy place. It's also kind of a drag --simultaneously a great way to reach a lot of people in the area AND guarantee several days of frustrating flakes, frauds and e-mail tag. But we're not here (only!) to kick Craigslist around -- it's a great service and will likely always be a big part of the local Internet experience.

We do, however, want to learn more about the opportunities left behind by the big CL or eBay's kijiji, or even aggregator Oodle. So we're working on our own classifieds solution for neighborhood blogging. We rolled out an early version of the service on my 'hood blog:

It's a simple start. But we're excited to see how the following factors play out.

• Geographic definition at finer grain than metro: We're interested to learn if this a potential key differentiator for our service. Maybe improving on -- or, at least, being an alternative to -- Craigslist is as simple as providing service focused on a neighborhood.
• Marketplace for a community of registered users: This factor is double edged. On one hand, we really want to see how the potential for reputation and community play out with classifieds added to the mix. But it might also be a detrimental factor -- maybe users who have cultivated their registered persona don't want to be associated with the classified ads they would normally place. We're kicking around some solutions that hopefully enable some of the good community aspects of registration without getting tangled up in some of the potential bad in the factor.
• Onramp for display advertising: Making the leap to online advertising requires a nudge or two along the way. We are looking at ways to make it easy for people to upgrade their classified to a display ad running on the site.
• Paid classifieds: This factor is old school. Hard to believe how much some newspapers still charge for their print classifieds. We want to know if a cheaper (but still paid) environment would gain traction and possibly even provide an added level of quality vs. the Web's free offerings.

Those are some of the ideas we're kicking around as we develop the classifieds service. We may incorporate one or all when we roll out classifieds to the entire Neighborlogs service.