Conducted 13 Interviews at Personal Democracy Forum

In the spirit of "Personal Democracy," I created my own virtual conference at the Personal Democracy Forum 2005. After attending the opening talk and two morning break-out sessions, I pulled aside the following 13 conference speakers and interviewed them about emerging new media trends:

UPDATE 2/8/06: Click on the names below to listen to the interview -- or use this Interview Audio feed to download all of the interviews.

	Markos Moulitsas	DailyKos
	Jeff Jarvis	Buzzmachine.com
	Hugh Hewitt	HughHewitt.com
	Dan Gillmor	Grassroots Media Inc. Author of We the Media UPDATE: Center for Citizen Media
	Chris Nolan	ChrisNolan.com UPDATE:Spot-On.com
	Halley Suitt	Halley's Comment Blog
	Rebecca MacKinnon	RConversation & Global Voices Online
	Doc Searls	Doc Searls Weblog
	Mindy Finn	Republican National Committee Deputy eCampaign Director
	Sheldon Rampton	PRWatch.org & SourceWatch
	Christopher Rabb	Afro-Netizen
	Scott Heiferman	Co-Founder and CEO of Meetup.com
	Hossein Derakhshan	Hoder.com

I captured about 2.25 hours of interview footage by lurking around outside the conference rooms from noon until 7 p.m. I definitely had a unique conference experience, and I plan on cutting together some highlights and open-sourcing the audio of the interviews soon.

With so many new media luminaries at one place and one time, I thought that it'd be a shame to pass up the opportunity to get their predictions on the record for how they see the evolution of media, politics and culture.

Nearly everyone seemed to agree that things are changing so fast that it's really hard to predict exactly what is going to happen.

The emergence of blogs and podcasts have already made lightening quick impacts on politics and culture.

There are even more changes afoot with the technological infrastructure and tools such as CivicSpace & Drupal that have the potential to really empower the grassroots. The public will soon become a powerful institution in it's own right.

I pretty much talked with everyone that I targeted except for two:

Josh Marshall wanted to do an interview but was swamped with all of the irons he has in his fire. He said to e-mail him to try to do a quick interview on Tuesday, but he evidently was too swamped since I never heard back from him.

Arianna Huffington also seemed willing to do an interview, but I couldn't pin her down between running between her panel, Reuters, CNN, personal meetings, phone calls, etc.

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