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.

HomeStore.com is rebranding itself as Move.com next quarter and making a wide variety of changes to its product offerings and business model. Taken together, these changes have the potential to make the company a stronger competitor for advertising revenues.

We're most interested in their plan to enable Realtors and others to provide community information. Our guess is that this will prove beneficial to us, by raising awareness of the value of this content, and the difficulty the company will have in doing it well on a national basis.

HouseValues stock got hammered the other day, per Motley Fool, on guidance from the company that 2006 earnings will fall below analysts' estimates.

HouseValues has recently expanded its online offerings with its new HomePages product. It needed something to compensate for its core business' complete lack of value to consumers. HomePages, however, is a slick but "me-too" offering in a very crowded field. Thus far, Zillow is the clear leader in offering information on housing values.

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.

An e-mail correspondent, to whom I'd sent a link to Yo Chicago, suggested that it "looks a lot like a next-gen real estate site."

I prefer to think of it as a gen-after-next-gen site, but wonder whether that leaves me where I've been too often in the past: too smart, too soon; too bad.

This time around, I don't think so. Too soon becomes too late in an eye-blink today. Too smart? No such thing any more, unless you're trying to sell to newspapers.

If we’re able to realize even a tenth of Yo Chicago’s audience and revenue potential, it will spawn imitators around the country. Our innovations will then come to seem commonplace. Many of them will vanish, as we imitate the imitators who find better ways of doing what we’re doing.

A year from now, even I will have forgotten many of the elements in the metropolis of “firsts" that Yo Chicago and its content represent. It’s difficult enough now to track the firsts, and even if it were possible to enumerate them all, there isn’t enough time to do so – or enough value in the effort. If you doubt that, just try describing a new city sewer pipe by sewer pipe, house by house, alley by alley, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood.

Know us first and best by our ambition: we’re out to build a dazzling destination metropolis. It helps to think of the process we’re in as playing SimCity.

I like the SimCity analogy because it picks up some continuing threads in my life. There’s the Master’s in Urban Planning program that I began and didn’t finish, but that left me a lifelong disciple of Jane Jacobs and Saul Alinsky. There’s my son Jordan, who’s been a SimCity addict / adept for more than a dozen years. And, any game I’m in I’m in as much for the serendipity of it, and to pass the time, as for any other payoff that might result.

Think of Yo Chicago as a sim city. Thus far, we’ve passed some enabling ordinances and sketched out a plan to generate high revenues from low taxes. Until other revenues begin, we have a business that pays enough in taxes to pay the bills and provide funds for investment.

We’ve laid out some water and sewer lines, provided a lot of electricity, built some traffic and communications infrastructure, added a few parks, a decent library, some photo galleries, the plot plan for a public square, the foundation of a school …

We have to build wider before we can build higher. As we get further along in our metropolis, we’ll have some twisters, some lightning bolts, possibly even a meteorite impact. We’ll have to learn to cope with pollution – and hopefully with congestion – and will need to call in the fire and police departments on occasion. Some of our vacant lots will never be developed. Some of our buildings will become distressed and need to be demolished. Development will proceed in directions we don’t currently anticipate, and will cost more than we expected.

We have some proven guidelines to follow. We’ll begin to draw some tourists and some curiosity-seeking transients, and convert some of them into temporary or permanent residents before we can attract much commercial development.

We can maintain focus, because our competitors are languishing in their Detroit while we concentrate on building our New York.

We're starting to light up the YoChicago photo galleries, which present an honest overview of Chicago neighborhoods - something you're not likely to see on any other real estate site.

See the Lake View and Edgewater (samples below) galleries for a preview of the thousands of photos we're adding.

Photos by Joeff Davis