Craigslist online ads spur suit

Gazette, The (Colorado Springs), Feb 19, 2006 by JIM BAINBRIDGE Gazette online reporter

A Chicago fair-housing group has filed suit against the Craigslist Web site for allegedly publishing discriminatory advertisements, a groundbreaking case that could test the legal liabilities of online ad venues.

The Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law is seeking to hold San Francisco-based Craigslist and all other online classified sites to the same guidelines observed by publishers of print classified advertisements.

The federal suit alleges that over a six-month period beginning in July, the site posted more than 100 ads in Chicago that violated the Fair Housing Act on the basis of race, religion, sex, family status or national origin.

Among the ads in violation were "Non-women of Color NEED NOT APPLY," "African-Americans and Arabians tend to clash with me so that won't work out" and "Requirements: Clean Godly Christian Male."

Craigslist has eight million new ads submitted each month and does not have a system to prescreen or approve ads. The closest it comes to policing the site is a protocol that allows a site user who encounters an inappropriate or illegal ad to flag it for removal. Craigslist will then comply quickly.

www.clccrul.org

College grads start job search online

Sixty-nine percent of recent college graduates posted their rsums online last year, most using Monster.com, according to a new study by Y2M: Youth Media + Marketing Networks.

The study, based on a survey of 1,500 recent graduates, found that usage of major online job sites surged from 2002 to 2005. Last year, 62 percent of respondents who used Internet job sites posted rsums on Monster.com, up from around 30 percent in 2004. Forty-nine percent used CareerBuilder.com, an increase of about 10 percent from a year earlier; and 31 percent posted on HotJobs.com, which drew less than 10 percent in '04.

The survey also found that recent grads were large consumers of online media in general. Almost half -- 47 percent -- said they downloaded music, up from less than 20 percent in 2004.

www.y2m.com

Nine of 10 Net users share online content

The United States has a reputation for being a generous and sharing country, and that is certainly true once we go online.

A new study by Sharpe Partners shows that 89 percent of American Internet users share content with others via e-mail -- 63 percent do so every week. Three-quarters of those polled said they forwarded content to as many as six recipients.

"We knew a lot of people were sharing content," said Kathy Sharpe, CEO of Sharpe Partners, "but even we didn't expect it to be so pervasive."

The most popular forwarded content, by far, was humorous/jokes/ cartoons at 88 per-cent, followed by news articles (56 percent), health care/medical (32), religious/spiritual (30), games (25) and sports/hobbies (24).

www.sharpepartners.com

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0126 or jim.bainbridge@gazette.com