Our founder and President Cynthia Typaldos went up to San Francisco to speak with PBS MediaShift blogger Mark Glaser recently and he posted this great interview with video clips.

If advertising alone isn’t going to support all the online journalism and content sites, and pay walls will just turn readers away, perhaps there’s another solution, a third way: Social payments. More than just simple donations, social payment systems such as Kachingle … simplify giving money to sites you visit. [Such] services set up a monthly payment system, with a set amount each month, and the more sites you like, the more ways your payment is split.

[Glaser] Tell me about social payments, explain to me what they are, and also tell me about your own background.

Cynthia Typaldos: My background is all high-tech. I have a degree in computer science, an MBA at MIT, and I’ve worked at a number of technology companies, including Sun Microsystems. I did my first startup called GolfWeb in 1995. I’m not a golfer, by the way, but it was a great place to learn about the social aspect of the Internet, because most of golf is about being social. Then I did another startup called Real Communities, which was an earlier form of Ning, but was too early. So this is my third startup.

As far as social payments, it’s the name that’s gelling now around people voluntarily paying for free content online. It sounds crazy, in a way, because you wonder why people would pay for free stuff. But we think it’s a new movement that will be successful because people want to support great digital content and services they love, to make sure they’ll be around. On Kachingle, they get credit for that and build a persona around what they’re consuming and supporting.

[Glaser] How has your growth been so far? How many sites are using it and how many users do you have?

Typaldos: That’s a good question. We have almost 300 sites … and we have individual blogs. What’s important is that we’re getting the idea of social payments out there. The main thing that’s important is how many times our medallion is served up. The medallion is our widget that runs on publishers’ sites. And those views have peaked at more than 1 million medallion views per day.

[Glaser] Tell me how it works. Does a publisher’s site have to have PayPal to make it work? Can they take credit card payments?

Typaldos: It’s really very simple. A publisher pulls the medallion from our site, and posts our medallion on their site — and they could even have multiple medallions for various parts of the site. Each medallion can have its own PayPal account. So they could have the money go to the newspaper’s finances or it could even go to one journalist. It’s their choice. Yes, it does go into PayPal, so they need an account to retrieve it.