I had the following interesting email thread with a person today (name omitted for privacy):

(12/7/2009 8:55PM) Person A:

If they are still available, Id love to buy both.

Thanks,

Person A

(12/8/2009 9:18AM) Me:

Hi Person A,

Thanks for your email. I have one marked to be sold on Friday, but if you can come tonight (after 9pm, though) then I’ll sell both. Otherwise, as I’ll be gone Wednesday and Thursday, I’ll have to wait to see if the other person will come buy one (I am fairly confident he will come) – if you can’t make it tonight but still want one of them, I’ll sell it for $15 instead of $20.

I live very close to the corner of Front and Catherine. Hopefully that made sense. Let me know about tonight. Thanks again!

[paul]

(12/8/2009 1:31PM) Person A:

Paul,

I could definately do tonight. I’ll take both. This is a gift for someone. What else do I need? The game? Any game in particular for these?

Thanks,

Person A

(12/8/2009 1:34PM) Me:

Hi Person A,

Thanks for your email. These guitars work specifically with the Guitar Hero set of games, and I am pretty sure (but not certain) that they don’t work with the Rock Band set of games.

So – pretty much you want to get any of the Guitar Hero games. I don’t have anything else – I used to have it, but I turned in my games in a double-reward turn-in offer and sold the Wii system on ebay.

So – give me a time when you’ll come tonight and I’ll verify. Then call me at my mobile below when you’re there, and I’ll come out with the goods.

[paul]

(12/8/2009 3:05PM) Person A:

Paul,

F rock band! I like guitar hero. I am a stand up comic and your last email prompted me to write 5 minutes on how buying ANYTHING on craigslist feels like a drug deal. Maybe it was your use of the word “goods” or maybe it was because the last player piano I bought was filled with hash.

Expect me around 9 on the money.

(12/8/2009 4:01PM) Me:

Hi Person A,

Ha – very good then! See you at 9.

[paul]

Interesting, huh? Well, maybe it’s boring. Regardless, it’s different, and it has made me think about the differences in discourse via Craigslist, as opposed to “normal” e-mail discourse (whatever that is).

So, I am asking everyone to submit to me (via email to paul@myraff.com) their own Craigslist threads for the sale of a certain item. It can be in whatever format you want – I will do the parsing – but you can be assured of the following, if you don’t do it yourself:

  1. Names will be masked.
  2. Contact information will be masked.
  3. Specific home addresses will be masked.

What I hope to do is create a corpus of roughly 5000 email threads for the items and do a linguistic analysis of the text. Sadly I can’t go straight to Craigslist since all they do is arrange for the sending of the first email, and they are gone after that.