OK, so I was at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin the last few days and I must confess that I avoided a lot of the content that did not apply to business or convergence. Lucky for me, there was an entire digital convergence track of panels held in Room 15. Essentially, that's where I spent all my time. Unless I was gazing up at overstuffed club chairs where the key note speakers sat to be interviewed. The set was a little surreal, but it got even more surreal when Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia interviewed Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist.
First off, Craig is funny. Not in a standup comedian kind of way, but like your slightly cynical friend who you can call upon when it's a sunny Friday and you've just won the lottery, but still somehow want to be a little whiney about something. He really emphasized that for Craigslist, its success came from getting out of the way of users and letting them use the site in a manner that they want to. He also mentioned that having eBay owning a large stake of your company isn't a bad thing because it helps Newmark get respect from Internet Service Providers when one of their clients is spamming or causing problems on Craigslist.
But essentially his message was one that people are basically good (aside from New York apartment brokers who were apparently violating federal anti-discrimination laws on Craigslist) and that letting people communicate freely was the function of the Internet. Wales had a similar worldview, explaining that despite a few bad apples adding incorrect information to Wikipedia, the information was still solid and usable.
And in a crowd full of idealistic young technologists, the question around Google's ethics in censoring Chinese Web sites came up. Newmark was pretty thoughtful, stressing that he trusts the founders of Google and sees a rationale for them going into China and possibly improving things there over the long run. Wales was a little less diplomatic, saying that he would never, ever operate in China if it called for censoring information. The crowd went wild, but I couldn't help but wonder if Wales would feel the same set of ethics around his new for-profit company Wikia that just raised $4 million from Bessemer Ventures. It's easy to take an extreme stance at non-profit community-created Wikipedia, but with actual shareholders his tune may have to change a bit.
For my final confession, I'll link to a blog about the keynote by uber-blogger Heather Armstrong, also known as Dooce, because I didn't attend that or any other celebrity blogger type sessions. — Stacey Higginbotham
Go to story from The Tampa Bay Business Journal
Go to story from CNET News.com
Technorati tags: sxsw, sxswi, sxsw2006, sxswi2006, sxsw06
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