Craigslist founder Craig Newmark supports multinational coffee chain's outlet at 4th and King. (Photo by glovercom)

Senator Clinton polls higher than Senator Obama in Santa Clara County, 43 percent to 27 percent, a Clinton campaign staffer told the Wall Street Journal. But we know what really counts in Silicon Valley: money. And when it comes to raising cash, Barack Obama's winning over the tech crowd. He raised about $500,000 just last weekend at a breakfast in Atherton. Wondering who was there? Here's a list of known Silicon Valley supporters for each candidate.

Stealing classified-ad revenues from big media was far too easy. Craigslist has found a challenge that its ample pockets are up to: corrupting the minds of future journalists. It has given $1.6 million to UC-Berkeley's Center for New Media, which works with departments ranging from engineering to journalism to determine the extent of the Internet's effect on our lives, to create an endowed faculty chair.

It's one of the great ironies. Craig Newmark and his colleagues at Craigslist are left-wing idealists who still believe in the responsibility of the press to speak truth to power. All the while, their online classifieds site, which is largely free, has undermined the economics of newspapers, and the anti-establishment alt weeklies above all. The company's decision to endow a faculty chair in new media studies at the University of California, Berkeley is a sweet gesture. (As is the support of the endearingly naive Craigslist boss for online news ventures such as Daylife.) But let's be clear: this is akin to the creation of a reservation for American Indians; it doesn't erase the stain of genocide.

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark discusses 12-year-old Craigslist's past and future in an interview. He never specifically addresses how he got millions of dollars from eBay in a side deal when it acquired a stake in his company. He does have this to say on how he runs Craigslist: "There's nothing noble or altruistic or pious about this; it just feels right." [Computerworld]

The Freakonomics blog had their readership submit questions for Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster. The answers are unfulfilling. Disappointing that they didn't select our question: just how much money did you make when eBay took a stake in your company? [Freakonomics]

Mediabistro, the little $23-million media company that could, is turning 10! So they're throwing themselves a party tonight, with a special extra: The Golden Boa Awards, which recognizes 10 media stars from "from within the 10 verticals that mediabistro.com serves," according to the press release. Mmm, verticals. Each lucky honoree will go home tonight with an actual bronzed feather boa—provided, that is, that they show up—in honor of nutty genius and former owner and for-now senior vice president Laurel Touby. But which of these 10 "media stars" might you see if you crash?

The Freakonomics blog is inviting readers to pose questions for Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster to be asked in an upcoming Q&A. The blog's readers have already started to make pointed suggestions, but none has stepped forward to ask this question: Exactly how much money did Newmark and Buckmaster make when eBay took a stake in their company?

Before the Googleplex there was a garage. Prior to Marck Zuckerberg's hip Facebook HQ, he had a dorm room. Second Life got its start in a small warehouse - now turned Moroccan furniture store — found in Linden Alley. And Craigslist? That's still basically run out of a house. Business 2.0 chief of reporters Yi-Wyn Yen goes on a photographic tour of Web startup birthplaces. If you need motivation to jump on the giant Web 2.0 bubble, check it out. And work on your coding.

A fascinating tidbit buried in a story about Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin's allegations of child prostitution on Craigslist: Susan MacTavish Best, Craigslist spokeswoman and girlfriend of CEO Jim Buckmaster, claims that Craig Newmark "is no longer involved in the company's daily affairs," according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. And indeed, Newmark, the company's founder, though he was listed on the Craigslist management page a week ago, no longer appears there. Newmark has certainly made enough money, thanks to a 2004 stock purchase by eBay, to retire on. And his "team bio," still online, notes that he's "embarrassed" that the site is named after him. But for the geeks who still idolize him, the idea of a Craigslist without Craig would be hard to bear. Update: We heard from Newmark. His comments, after the jump.

On the left, Craig Newmark, the filthy-rich founder of Craigslist, the site that has, some say, decimated the newspaper business by making classifieds ads irrelevant. On the right, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, who, rumor has it, has decided to drop its subscription-only TimesSelect service. No word on if this was taken mere moments before Sulzberger decided to throttle Newmark, on behalf of wealthy newspaper families everywhere. Given Newmark's tendency to bloviate endlessly, baselessly, and tediously, in a monotone drone, on what he sees as biased reporting, we'd hardly blame Sulzberger for anything he did. (Photo by Esther Dyson)

First came Facebook's marketplace feature, a challenger to Craigslist's for-sale listings. Now the social network is taking on filthy-rich Craig Newmark in another key attractor: the couch-surfing market. Travel search-engine SideStep has signed up on Mark Zuckerberg's team by building a Facebook app, CouchSwap, to target the broke college-student traveler. You can search for a couch by location or send out special requests — a much more efficient way to go about locating crash space than trawling Craigslist listings. And after a successful crash, users can rate their stay. If you want to participate, though, you'll have to be willing to share your living room, too — a requirement Craigslist doesn't impose. The dark horse in this race: The established CouchSurfing.com community. (Photo by Erik Abderhalden)

Everything you know about Craig Newmark is wrong. The tale that Craigslist's founder and CEO Jim Buckmaster like to tell about how eBay got a stake in their company goes like this: Newmark, the clueless business naif, issued shares to an employee, never thinking they'd be cashed in. That employee turned around and sold the shares right under Newmark's nose to rapacious auctions giant eBay back in 2004. It's a good story. But it's nothing like the truth, according to sources close to the transaction. And the truth? That Newmark and Buckmaster, who love to portray themselves as unpretentious types who care nothing for money, can be bought. For a mere $16 million.

The founder of the world's best classifieds section recently appeared on "The Charlie Rose Show," where the host asked in his sexy whisper, "What are your favorite websites?" Craig's first pick is the Dilbert blog, but he then names the political blogs Daily Kos and Instapundit, the Huffington Post, and other members of what Craig calls the "Soho Blogplex."

Craig Newmark of Craigslist has high praise for friend Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. "What Jimmy has done through Wikipedia is change the way people write history. Before, it was guys with guns, now it's anyone." Well, to be accurate, Craig, now it's guys with lightsabers. [San Francisco Chronicle]

Resistance is futile. We wish to improve nonprofits. We will add your charitable and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your website will adapt to service ours.

Andy Plesser of Beet.tv has a rare interview with Gabe Rivera, the creator of everyone's favorite automated tech news "digger" TechMeme. The interview reveals the secret sauce of the news aggregator and its progenitor: an uncanny facsimile of tech and pop icon Craig Newmark's winningest attributes! Craig, the founder of the eponymous Craigslist, and Gabe, the lone man behind TechMeme, are both self-deprecating and aphoristic nebbishes motivated by the altruism their audiences enjoy.

Tourists and teenagers outside the Time Warner Center last night clutched digital cameras, all hoping to get their very own photograph of John Mayer or America Ferrara as they arrived to celebrate the Time 100—the Most Influential People in the World! (One assumed that crowd was less interested in arrivals such as Dr. Henry Kissinger.) Inside, the scene was more of the same: dozens of professional photographers jockeying for position, a crowd of onlookers. It seemed appropriate that the Time Warner Center is just a big mall. The scene could have been one that gets played out in Tallahassee and Des Moines and Houston every time Miss USA comes to town. We took tourist-photos too, with Nikola Tamindzic, who has even more.

This morning's opening session of the Newspaper Association of America's annual convention at the Marriott Marquis did not, for the most part, stray from the now-tired narrative about newspapers and their modern troubles. The publisher and CEO of the Washington Post, the rather improbably named Boisfeuillet Jones Jr., said that newspapers are preserving something called youth-oriented content. (Think of the children!) Journalism, he reminded the crowd, advances a great value to the nation. The crowd seemed to totally agree! John Sturm, who is the president of the Newspaper Association of America—whose board has five women among its 35 members, including Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson—made a joke about the Broadway play Spamalot, which some conference attendees are attending tomorrow night. Synergy! He also said that the Internet is the future. "When you add everything together, our audience is increasing!" he promised the crowd.