Craigslist’s Craig Newmark has been out visiting apartment rental services in New York.

My visit first creates a combination of disbelief and panic. I don't really say "Sure is a nice place you have here, sure be a shame if…", which is to say I manage to control my sense of humor, but it's tempting.

Not too tempting: Craig knows how dependent his business is on letting the fraudsters prey on his so-called community. He’s encouraged them for years, and shows no signs of stopping.

If you’re too lazy to run your own mass advertising scams on Craigslist, you can hire these guys to do it for you. Need to spam the nation with thousands of phony listings overnight? Not a problem.

Think Craig will protect his community from mass spam? Think again. Craigslist is all about the money. The more active the marketplace appears to be, the more money will flow in the long run.

Mike Miner's ever-enjoyable Hot Type column at the Chicago Reader has a deliciously ambiguous quote from Craigslist's Craig.

eBay and Craigslist, says Newmark, "share a similar moral compass."

It's a moral compass they share with Gordon Gekko: "Greed is good… It's all about the bucks, kid. The rest is conversation."

Tim Redmond of the San Francisco Bay Guardian compares Craigslist’s effect on local communities to that of Wal-Mart. That’s a harsh comparison since Wal-Mart, as everyone knows, is the embodiment of evil – the destroyer of local communities – among many alternative newsweeklies.

I realize I’m late in jumping into the Craigslist is Wal-Mart discussion – Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine has backhanded Redmond pretty well and there’s a lot to learn from the comments on his post – but I’d like to add a different twist on it.

Media folk, mainstream, alternative and blogosphere alike, don’t seem to understand exactly how a Craigslist is Wal-Mart analogy plays out in the the world beyond their narrow world. One of the smartest among them tells me in an e-mail that he thinks the comparison is likely to stick – and tar Craigslist.

The real danger with equating Craigslist and Wal-Mart is that the great majority of the American people will come away from the comparison with a very positive impression of Craigslist. “Oh, it’s like Wal-Mart; must be great."

Yet another depressing sign of media myopia.

Few seem to want to confront the fact that Craigslist’s fate will, at some date, be dictated by eBay, which owns a significant minority stake in Craig Newmark’s enterprise.

Even fewer, it seems, want to look very closely at the realities of Craigslist’s so-called "community" and the real costs of his so-called "free" postings. When it takes control of Craigslist from its useful idiot, Craig Newmark, as it is likely to do some day, eBay will have noble reasons for doing so, and lay a lot of cash on Craig. It will then clean up Craigslist (to some extent) by raising fees and imposing them in more categories more quickly: eBay doesn’t much believe in free. No reason why they should.

eBay has played this game out before. It has significant experience in creating a community that harnesses the energies of a large number of people to the primary benefit of eBay. It’s easy to see the same dynamic that built eBay at play in Craigslist.

There’s much doubt about whether Lenin ever described the Western intellectuals who were fooled into believing in his workers’ paradise as "useful idiots." There’s not much doubt, if you’re clear-eyed about all this, that Craig Newmark – yes, fuzzy, warm, good-guy Craig – is currently playing the role of eBay’s useful idiot.

Lenin, somewhat less debatably, also contended that when it came time to hang all the members of the bourgeoisie, the world’s capitalists would sell him the rope, because their greed was unbounded and unprincipled.

Craigslist’s real estate listings are the primary competitor for Yo Chicago’s paid ones, and you need to read what we say in light of the dog that we have in this fight.

We’ll be writing more about our primary competitor as we go along, and explaining in more detail how a free couch is a strong rope.

I'm in this to make money. At this point, no one should doubt that Craig Newmark is too. Watch what he does, not what he says. He has world-class tutors taking him along a well-trod path.

“He waxes desperate with imagination," says Horatio of prince Hamlet, and so say I of Craig Newmark.

Mr. Newmark wants our admiration for his having created and attempted to preserve the illusion of a community founded on and grounded in "nerd values."

Fail to grant him the proper deference, and he closes debate with princely disdain: "I can see you just don’t like us. Gotta leave it at that."

Well, Mr. Newmark, some of the commoners think that the nature of the community you’ve created, and whether you’re ruling over it properly – or simply fiddling and diddling while many of your trusting subjects are burned – is a fair subject of debate.

Don’t gotta leave it at that. More, later.

Our rental salesperson hit the street for the first time today, approaching Lake View landlords. We’re targeting Lake View because of its size, its relatively high vacancy rate, its position as a first-choice port-of-entry for many young renters, and its proximity to our offices.

Yo Chicago, to succeed, needs to attract advertising from the small- and medium-sized landlords whose buildings make up the great bulk of the Chicago rental market.

We know, from past experience and what’s currently happening on Craigslist, that the rental finder services will set out to destroy the utility of our site by junking it up with repeated listings that are deceptive at best, and frequently fraudulent. Look at what they’ve done to Craigslist in New York and, yes, Chicago, if you need any evidence for that statement.

I’ve been looking at Craigslist postings and at the Web sites of a number of rental services. Not much has changed in the 10+ years since I’ve had close contact with these folks. Back then they were sliming my newspaper and the Reader classifieds. They’re still sliming the Reader, because they’re still, in general, a pretty slimy bunch.

Our policies will explicitly bar rental services from advertising any property on which they don’t have an exclusive written listing.

Craig Newmark might diddle around these folks, but I won’t. I didn't spend five years at a large law firm practicing nicey-nice.

At the first hint of fraudulent behavior affecting Yo Chicago on the part of the rental services, we’ll go for the offenders’ throats, and go directly to the state licensing authorities.

A scorched-earth policy is the only one these services understand, and we’ll make sure that they don’t misunderstand us: hey, guys, can you spell “shock and awe?" How about “smart bombs?" Are all of your salespeople properly licensed? Do you have a properly licensed managing broker in your offices? Are your escrow accounts completely up to snuff? Are you confident your ex-employees and competitors won't rat out your business practices?

The reputable rental services won’t have a problem with our approach, which may take us a while to build up our volume of rental listings. But at least renters will be able to count on the listings on our site being legitimate – and that should give us a huge edge over Craigslist.