According to this survey, the "Content is King" days are re-emerging. (That's the thing ya gotta love about pendulums: they always swing back.)As the development and consumption of Internet content grows, I will be keen to see how it all plays out with the Web 2.0 & Long Tail trends. There are a lot of hotshit companies out there who are figuring out how-to better index, tag, serve, track and share Internet multimedia of all sorts, and how-to make it all work in a multi-platform (firmware - PC, iPod, cellphone, etc.), multi-service (VOIP, SMS, IM, Presence, etc.) environment.
I see a confluence-in-the-making, leading us toward a Web of unheralded importance & fun:
The Internet (specifically broadband) is growing in terms of audience and influence;
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Internet content development & consumption are projected to rise dramatically;
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Mashups are empowering changes to consumers' surfing habits: the channel-surfing of TV Days (pull) will be supplanted by an integrated browsing experience (push/on-demand), in which content is sucked up, re-mixed & re-presented based on users' proven/projected habits and/or the proven/projected desires of their social network;
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Long Tail theologians make sure that there's nothing too obscure or perverse to create.
It's worth extrapolating: Imagine a day in which a Firefox extension enables your browser to fire up a Web experience based on your typical surfing patterns, but also mashes this experience together, based on: where you are geographically located at the time of the session... auto-detected download speeds... browser versions... plug-ins... even the time of day.
That's the easy part, though. We need to further imagine that this Firefox extension also enabled you to reconfigure your browsing experience based on the tagged-on-the-fly, in-the-making, up-to-the-minute surfing sessions of your friends and/or social group.
And what if that social-surfing group was also configurable on-the-fly? ... "Let me see a mashed-up view of the Web, based on what my LinkedIn network has been looking at (safe-for-work surfing)... Let's see what all my college buddies are looking at (not-safe-for-work surfing)... Let's see what all my IM friends are doing..." (all of this would be anonymized at some level, of course)!
What does this mean for PR? It's all GOOD. As noted recently, more content implies more influencers to develop the content, which creates more opportunity to influence these influencers - who will, no doubt, be voraciously hungry for good content, which PR can help to provide. A virtuous cycle.
What am I talking about, here? "Web 2.0" is already taken, as a moniker. Maybe "Surfing 2.0"? "Content 2.0"?
How about "Fun 2.0"?