Wales / Newmark keynote.

The founder of craigslist talks with Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales about how a simple interface and an easy-going zen attitude have helped to make life better for millions of users across the world.

Craig Newmark Founder, Craigslist

Jimmy Wales Pres, Wikimedia Foundation Inc

Customer service rep+founder. The users run the site, not craig.

"In history, the winners wrote the history books, but things have changed." So do wikipedians = losers?

You get detached from reality dealing with management / intermedaries. One of Newmark's inspirations is the phone company - he looks at their custserv and does the opposite.

##What kind of informational attacks has he had?

obviously scammers from west africa and east europe. Lots of swiftboating on CL around the elections. He deals with shilling quite a bit - is concerned with smear situation on these "new news sites" and wikipedia.

##Crooks are early adopters

"people are overwhelmingly trustworthy and good" so as more and more and more "good people" come online the ratio of good guys to bad guys online will get better. Wikipedia experience supports idea that most folks "do unto others as"

##Tivo will save democracy?

Craig is doing an Amanda Congdon impression. What a card. Now he's talking about West Wing endlessly. He keeps dropping political bombs and referring to his pride in President Bartlett. If everyone starts skipping political commercials on their DVRs it will negate them. Then politicians will actually have to *say* more, and the system will change.

"People everywhere have pretty much the same interests" they just talk about it more in san francisco (referring to Casual Encounters)

Corps: a lot of people that want to do the job right, want to listen, but their corp culture is contrary to that. he is experimenting iwth giving people the courage to change things internally.

##Journalism

"when it comes to news and journalism and stuff i'm very much an amateur, a dilettante, but for some strange reason people will listen to me"

In order to live in a democratic society, you need good sources of news. He says CL is affecting the media industry, says they are draining some revenue from them but it is overstated, but what is bigger is that they are seeing again that we need investigative journalism. Newspapers have been firing investigative journalists for the last couple decades.

Normal people commenting on the news, trying to decide what are the most reliable versions of stories. Dan Gilmour is putting together a think tank on citizen journalism. There are a lot of efforts but there's no academia on it, no specific reports on the space.

Center for Public Integrity writes a book every couple years called "Selling Of The President" they want to blog it now. Putting online databases of fundraising. Exciting opportunites for citizen journalists, highschool composition classes. Build something that says 'pick your district' and out pops a record of things that maybe shouldn't be happening.

If you want to tell the Truth, make them laugh or they will kill you.

No substitute for professionals - their efforts can be amplified by working with a swarm of citizens. Citizen journalism not replace traditional, but we'll have a new hybrid model

##communities

You can't abuse a community that you've built, throwing in ads or whatnot. you have to be fair and respectful of why your users are communing, and if you don't you will fail / blow up.

todo: find statesman article on FOIA delays.