NextWeb blog: Gil Penchina, CEO Wikia gave a talk about about “Giving insane levels of control to your customers”. What has he learned? Most people really are good, there are a few bad apples who spam your site, but the passionate outweigh the bad guys. Empowering customers is not easy, it takes faith and persistence, requires tools and SOftware, It’s about building a a “political” movement” not about writing software or content. Done right it’s very powerful and can have an impact on the world.

This was a good talk, but I was disappointed that he made no new announcements. It’s a long way to come to tell everybody what you are already doing. I asked him why.

He said: “We’re here to collaborate and share. When Mike Arrington criticised our search engine we actually admitted the search announcement wasn’t that good. We launched a project to build a great search engine and for that to be successful we need people to have a reason to come and help.”