Although it still has the look and feel of a website circa 1996 when it was started by Craig Newmark, Craigslist continues to be the go-to classified site to buy and sell local items.  Although Craigslist is offered in most cities and locations across the US, there is no way to search for Craigslist on a national level.  If you are looking to buy a bike in your city, this probably doesn’t matter but if you are looking to find a rare car or item that you would be willing to travel for or have shipped, Craigslist is limited.  This limitation led to the formation of Craiggers which is a Craigslist aggregator that lets you search for items through Craigslist on a national level in a user friendly and easy to use interface.

So if you are looking to break down the city level walls that Craigslist has erected, head to Craiggers and search nationally.

Traveling is fun, searching for flights is not.  There are a handful of sites out there that attempt to aggregate the dozens of flight booking engines, but none of them are great in my opinion.  Kayak.com and Bookingbuddy.com are just a couple such sites but the way they display available flights is not too intuitive.  Hipmunk aims to make searching for flights easier by narrowing down the criteria you care about and displaying results in a clever format that is easy on the eyes.  There are definitely some early bugs and some improvements that could be made, but the site is new and they are just starting to get funding and get some momentum going.  Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman decided to go back to Y Combinator with this start-up along with a small angel investor, so although the funding is small, it will be interesting to see if this site can gain some traction in this competitive market.  Plus, you gotta love their mascot!

If you’ve heard of Groupon, then you probably are already familiar with the new crop of group discount sites that have been popping up.  Just like my post last week about Gilt Group and the new breed of online discount buying clubs, the “group” buying local coupon sites are also taking the internet by storm.  These sites feature a deal a day in a specified city.  In order for that deal to be valid, a certain number of people need to purchase the coupon for it to work.  This promotes sharing of the deal which is good for you, good for the site and good for the business offering up the deal.  The only trick is that unlike a traditional coupon that you print or cut out, you must purchase the coupon.  For example, you might be buying $50 worth of food at a local restaurant for $25 so you pay the $25 up front through the website and then you present the restaurant with the coupon you print out to get your $50 worth of food.  Because the deals are local, its a great way for businesses to promote themselves and a great way for people to explore new places in their city for cheap.  After the success of Groupon and their large $30 million Series B funding in December, Groupon type sites are now popping up everywhere.  Although its getting hard to keep track of all the new sites, you can never get enough local deals…….click on the logos below to head to these other group buying sites:

and the newest kid on the block…….