"NewsTrust's more thoughtful approach can yield dramatically different top stories. On Tuesday, NewsTrust's users selected "Top Ten Myths About Iraq 2006," from a blog written by Juan Cole, president of the Global Americana Institute. Digg's top story was "50 Reasons -- why it's great to be a Guy!!" from a blog written by someone named Mike in Los Angeles." - San Jose Mercury News - Elise Ackerman

"The site is looking to judge news articles online by quality, rather than simple popularity, with a more finely grained evaluation of news stories than one gets from the gladiatorial thumbs-up, thumbs-down votes by which stories live and die on Digg. (...) NewsTrust, in essence, aims to counter the fascination of the inclusive crowd -- picture Britney Spears on a Linux-based

Last week, I wrote about a request I got from Idealist.org to help them prepare a "How to Wiki" guide - to help hosts who are organizing groups around the world, in support of their "Imagine a Better World" initiative (see Britt's interview with Ami Dar about this campaign here).

I got the note below from Joanna Eng of Idealist.org. I have until Friday 3/2, to answer their questions. Between two jobs and my volunteer work, this is going to be quite a challenge, so if y’all can help by posting your suggestions in reply to this post, bonus karma points for you. Thanks; Leo

Subject: Idealist.org Start-up Meetings and your use of the wiki

Dear Leo, Thanks for taking the initiative to set up the wiki for your start-up meeting! We admire your effective use of online tools to enhance the start-up meeting for all of the participants. Would you like to help us make it easier for other meeting hosts to do the same? We are planning to provide a series of "How To" guides on Idealist for start-up meeting hosts, including "How To Use a Wiki for Your Start-Up Meeting." Drawing from your experience, you can help us create this guide!
Here are some things you can do to help:

I stumbled upon what I think is a brilliant use of Flickr. Fabrice Florin, who now leads NewsTrust, took these pictures of people who attended Burning Man 2006. They each held up a board on which they wrote their wishes for the future. I’m going to pinch this idea for our next Idealist.org Silicon Valley event. I think it’s a neat way to keep a snapshot of each member’s mug and dreams.

We did our Idealist.org startup meeting on Sunday. People asked me how I thought it went, and I couldn’t really tell, since I was bouncing around so much. But going by the feedback that’s trickling in, I guess it went okay. And now for the hard part: how do we keep this new community going?

I found Britt's interview with Rosalyn Lemieux to be truly informative, and so submitted it to NewsTrust. If y’all could go over there and rate the story, I think it will be good for Britt & Netsquared. (I don’t work for Net2 or anything, but this community’s been very good to me – and Britt’s extraordinary – so if there’s anything we can do to raise their profiles, I think we should try to help). Never heard of NewsTrust? I posted about it here.

Craigslist Foundation invites you to attend Nonprofit Night on March 13 at 111 Minna in San Francisco. The night's focus is on Nonprofit Capacity Building Through Skill Sharing. Many aspects of nonprofit operations, strategy and technology can be vexing if you don't have the right people to ask for guidance. This Nonprofit Night, facilitated by Allen Gunn, will allow participants to form small groups based on areas of need and interest, to compare challenges, share skills and experiences, and otherwise discover allies and resources. This peer-to-peer sharing model will allow each attendee to solicit input and ideas on a topic or challenge of his or her choice, drawing from the experience of other nonprofit leaders. Click here to RSVP for this free event.

In a 50-minute interview, Commons contributor Paul Lamb gets up close and personal with Jed Emerson, rock star of a new breed of innovators in the fields of investment and philanthropy. While going into eye-glazing detail about such things as blended value, social returns on investment, and econometric externalities, Paul noses into Jed’s personal life --  discovering, for instance, that while Jed may have been dropped on his head as a kid, that’s not the main reason why he’s dedicated his life to social work. Follow this link to listen to the podcast, and to improve this story by editing the wiki. 

If you’re a news junkie, and you haven’t tried NewsTrust, don’t. It’s addictive and should be banned. But if I can’t stop you, there a few things you should know: (1) it’s a news rating service, (2) it allows ordinary people to judge the quality of sources and stories, (3) it provides structure within which to make such judgments, so you don’t have to make stuff up, (4) the process reveals a lot about what good journalism is and isn't, (5) it will tell you things you did not know about yourself, (6) if you’re already suffering from too much information, you can read just the highly-rated stories, or just those which were given high ratings by raters you trust, (7) it’s a community of some pretty smart people who care about the truth, (8) it’s run and backed by some very very good people, (9) I’m the volunteer host for its National Public Radio section, so am completely biased and not credible (if you want to draw more attention to an outlet that you trust, you too can sign up to be its host). If after all this you still click this link and get hooked, don’t say I didn’t warn you.