Craigslist CEO as Blasé as Ever

Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster issued his refrain of “We don’t compete, we take care of our community” during an on-stage Q&A today at the SIIA Information Industry Summit.

“If you focus exclusively on your users or customers’ well being and blot out everything else, I don’t know of a better strategy than that,” he said.

Ok, well if that’s true, how do you explain blocking those aggregators’ crawlers?

“That was not a problem for us from the standpoint of piracy,” he said. “It is a system load issue. Any time we have robots trying to repeatedly download [listings] from our site it’s a problem because it’s competing with our own users from a traffic standpoint. We block activities on a daily basis from all sorts of parties. It’s a daily struggle to keep robotic software from interacting with our site for… sub-par reasons.”

I can’t decide whether to believe him. Thoughts, readers? Leave them in comments