CRAIGSLIST started as a no-frills website with free listings for San Francisco area jobs and goods for sale. It has since swept the U.S. and is now all over Europe, Asia, Australia, Latin America . . . I don’t see any listings for Antarctica, but that day may come. The charm of CRAIGSLIST is that it does the same things as newspaper want ads, but its listings are free. And as time goes on, CRAIGSLIST keeps adding more features. While eBay deals in goods that are shipped from one location to another, Craigslist deals only in local jobs and local goods people can come to your house to pick up. And I can testify that Craigslist ads really work!

http://www.craigslist.org/

     GUMTREE.COM is similar to CRAIGSLIST but, according to the Wikipedia, it “is a network of free online classifieds and community websites in Australia, Hong Kong, Ireland, New Zealand, Poland, Singapore, South Africa, the UK, the USA. The main categories are flat share/house share and for rent, goods for sale, community, friends and dating, jobs and business services.” The address below takes you to the London GUMTREE, with connections to other cities and countries:

http://www.gumtree.com/

THE NEVER-ENDING GARAGE SALE

     One big difference between FREECYCLE.ORG and a garage sale: at FREECYCLE everything is free! And, as with CRAIGSLIST, everything is local. They say, “The Freecycle Network is made up of 4,182 groups with 4,144,000 members across the globe. It's a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer (them's good people). Membership is free.”

http://freecycle.org/