Cityfile: New York's Most Notable and Influential

♦  American Express may be looking for as much as $3.5 billion in government assistance as the company struggles with reduced consumer spending and rising defaults. [WSJ]
♦  Hope is fading fast at GM. Shares fell to $2.92 on Tuesday, the lowest level in 65 years, and the company does not expect "to continue as a going concern" without a rescue plan in place by the end of the year. Meanwhile, Democrats are pushing ahead with a plan to save the automaker. [NYT, Bloomberg]
♦  Who doesn't want a piece of the bailout? The line outside the Treasury Department in Washington is a long one. [NYT]

Fred Wilson needs you! New York's most prominent venture capitalist is giving a keynote speech at the Web 2.0 Expo at the Javits Center in a few weeks. But instead of finding time in his busy schedule to write the thing—or using the sack loads of cash he has accumulated to hire a professional—he plans to creating the speech on a wiki basis, which means he'll be able to sit back and observe (or sleep, left!) as giddy tech-heads do the work for him. Sound familiar? Yes, indeed. Maybe as part of another experiment with "crowdsourcing," he'll solicit some volunteer construction workers to help him finish off that 12-story palace he's building in the West Village?