I believe IdeaLab readers would benefit from a wide range of posts related to important developments taking place in the participatory media movement. With that in mind, here are two interviews that bear on that subject:
The first is an 11-minute talk with Nicholas Reville, co-founder and executive director of the Participatory Culture Foundation, maker of Miro at getmiro.com. Miro's an important, rapidly maturing application that lets you watch and subscribe to millions of channels of content created by anyone with something to say (you can pull down any videos with an RSS feed, for example). You can also browse through more than 4,000 channels in its directory listing. I've been using the open-source Miro for almost two years now and it's become a regular part of my grassroots media routine.
Watch or download video in H.264 on Ourmedia
Watch video on Vimeo
In the second, Sean Tanner, research director of MAPLight.org, talks about how the organization provides transparency to the political donations system through widgets that tap into pubic information databases.
By visiting MAPLight, you can customize and embed a widget related to any congressional race or to the presidential race. Here's the current Presidential Money Race Widget:
Creative Commons Attribution NC SA 3.0 License