Activists have been so unsuccessful at getting federal laws passed that they've found easier marks: city councils and some state legislatures.

Most notable of these has been Chicago City Council's ban on the sale of foie gras in city restaurants (which many restaurateurs have cleverly dodged by "giving away" foie gras with the purchase of "certain" salads, etc.

Following on Chicago's heels was the New York City Health Department's attempt to ban transfats.

Now, animal rights activists have gotten bills introduced in at least five state legislatures to ban the use of cages for egg-laying chickens. No matter that nearly all of the leading animal welfare and animal behavior scientific community considers these cages to be humane and in many ways better for the hens and the quality of consumers' eggs. Research shows that the hens are healthier, live longer and produce more and better eggs when they are raised in conventional cage production farms. Plus, eggs produced in this manner are 50% less expensive for consumers.

Mash-ups, a hybrid Web application that combines complimentary elements from two or more sources, are bringing together the best of both worlds and pushing for innovation. One such application is Unype that lays Internet-based phone Skype over Google Earth. Unype users can access Google earth, dial-up a friend over Skype and guide one another to desired locations while taking a look at places together and holding conversations.

Unype creators are already thinking ahead to higher-level versions. Going beyond the beta, they will be adding avatars to represent the parties going on virtual trips. The subsequent iteration will allow for multiple participants (think conference calls) and finally they will be able to drop in models onto places they see through Google Earth.

Adding avatars to a guided, visual conversation opens the floodgates to branding, experiential marketing and social networking. With construction models that avatars can view, walk through and change, we might finally be stepping out of Second Life and have more flexibility in organizing online events, demonstrations and collaborative spaces that has voice and animation. In the long run, this application has many uses for tourism, real estate and entertainment players who need to illustrate experiences to consumers. From a PR perspective, applications as such would open new venues to create events that reach people across borders, tap into their senses and solicit their feedback while bringing them closer to a brand, product or company.

Ever hear the one about those nerdy marketing whiz kids over at Hewlett-Packard? It goes something like: If HP was going to sell sushi they’d do it with a 200-page technical manual and call the product “Raw Fish.”

A lot of engineering-driven tech companies fall into this trap, failing to translate the wonders of tech innovation into language that is not only understandable but has enough style to inspire consumers to embrace a product and build brand allegiance.

A glaring current example of too much tech is the ongoing fits and starts of the campaign to move consumers to high-definition television, or HDTV.

Marketers from broadcast, cable, device and retail players have hyped the living daylights out of HDTV. But they’ve done so largely in tech speak with little to no consumer education or support.

The result? A building consumer backlash that threatens to seriously curtail the adoption of the very technology theses companies seek to promote. Amazingly, consumers who have plunked down top-dollar for high-definition systems and the premium services that go with them are watching… the same low-quality analog images they would have with much cheaper old-school TV sets.

According to a survey by Leichtman Research Group, half of the 24 million people who own HDTVs aren’t watching high-definition programs because they don’t have the right kind of hardware hooked up by their cable or other program suppliers. And half of those people, about 6 million, don’t even know they’re NOT watching HDTV.

Call it the Great HDTV Hoax. HDTVs are the antithesis of simple plug and play electronics products like the iPod -- just too complicated to set up and operate for Joe and Jane Consumer. It’s a throwback to the flashing 12:00 time display on yesterday’s impossible to program VCRs. Only this time it’s costing consumers a lot more to not take full advantage of what they’re paying for.

As has often been the case with advanced technology, the more sophisticated the functionality, the less user-friendly a product becomes. Some would say it’s innovation and R&D run amuck, overshooting the needs and abilities of consumers. Check out The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen for more on the concept of technology performance oversupply and the consequences for both business and tech-consuming customers.

All this of course spells opportunity for communications. The more complicated and pervasive technology becomes, the more technology needs smart consumer comms. Just try navigating the vagaries of 3G cell networks, AC-3 digital stereo or 1080i high-def.

In fact, the more complicated technology becomes, the more simple and straight ahead communication should be. From ads to press releases, every object of dialogue can help to demystify, educate and empower the consumer. And at the very least avoid turning off consumers to the point that they don’t purchase or return products they can’t understand, feeling frustrated and burned like so many would-be HDTV customers.

That means thinking when, if ever, to use hard-core tech terms -- does a consumer ever really need to know that “Standard NTSC (ITU-R 601) digital video has rectangular pixels and a standardized aspect ratio of...”?

It’s the old PR adage of describing tech by virtue of its consumer benefits (movie theater style sound) rather than its tech features (5.1 surround sound). It’s up to PR and marketing to push back on the engineers and find a better way to market products beyond early adopters on the bell curve.

But in this era of reference-, buzz-based communication, the opportunity lies well beyond sell sheets and press releases. Consumer education needs to happen organically, on and offline with the friends, family and peers that influence purchase decisions and brand buzz.

Here are three rules for all of us to live by:

1) Speak the Language of Digital Consumers…
Talk real-world benefits, not geek-based speeds and feeds.

2) In the Places Where They Live…
Replace websites and marketing collateral with friends and family brand ambassadors who can drive organic, reference-based WOM.

3) Early and Often.
Build advocacy while technology is nascent, communicating basics and benefits on and offline. Correcting course once you hit backlash mode, a la HDTV, requires all your resources just to get back to neutral if you’re lucky; meanwhile the market has likely moved on.

And when all else fails, always think sushi.

Just as the PR industry is beginning to figure out how to integrate bloggers into campaigns for their clients, new channels are emerging that may have even more potential than blogs – online TV. Thanks to the growing popularity of YouTube and other video sites, 15.5% of US households are now watching internet video compared to 9.4% who are buying and downloading music files. Across all age groups, watching internet video is significantly more popular than reading blogs. And in the over-25 crowd, it beats social networking as the primary online activity other than email.

A number of companies are taking advantage of this trend by launching online television networks. The March 19th edition of BusinessWeek notes that N3, Next New Networks, launched six channels in March on subjects from “sewing to comics.” Founded by veterans of MTV and AOL, the network hopes to launch 100 “super-niche” web channels.

Further along in its development, Diggnation attracts hundreds of thousands of viewers along with 15 corporate sponsors who pay $10,000 per episode, according to Business 2.0. For 45 minutes, the two 30-something hosts discuss the latest tech gadgets, often plugging their favorite products.

Another ready-to-launch web service called Joost has compiled 2,000 hours of copyright-protected programming to appeal to young males with content including extreme sports and shark videos. Michael Eisner’s latest venture, Veoh also plans to offer a niche series like Fearless Cooking, Triathlete TV and Wine Library TV.

Given the low cost of entry, we can expect to see hundreds of net TV offerings popping up in the next couple of years – all geared to highly-targeted audiences who are passionate about a specific topic. Imagine the opportunity for PR people when there are thousands of new broadcast outlets where they can place a product or a spokesperson. Compared to network TV, the viewership will be small but the potential will be enormous.

Much has been written about the impact of "Citizen Journalists" -- bloggers who comment about the news and even create their own. But anyone interested in the future of journalism and therefore PR should read David Carr's column in the March 19 edition of the New York Times.

Mr. Carr talks about a new experiment between Wired.com and an NYU journalism professor that plans on tapping into a broad group of netizens to report on specific topics. The professor who started the project at zero.newsassigment.net calls it "pro-am journalism" where ordinary people will produce work that will be iterated and edited by experienced journalists. It is a little like applying the principles of Wikipedia to the practices of traditional journalism.

Given the growth of consumer generated media, consumer generated news makes perfect sense even if it radically alters the concept of a newspaper or a magazine. In the beginning, experiments like this may only produce a few "crowdsourced" articles that actually get published. But the potential for the future is staggering.

Today Wikipedia is the #1 online source for information. Why couldn't the same idea work for news? If it does, the PR business will change dramatically as the number of "reporters" explodes and we become only one of many resources that journalists rely upon.

The recent Blogher Business Conference in New York provided many opportunities for brainstorming on the future of communications. One of the most striking trends I noticed across panel discussions and case-study presentations was the move towards open-source content development. This is nothing new to those Internet users who edit entries on Wikipedia. However, it is a rare occurrence among competing media sources. Here are two examples:

• The Washingtonpost.com bloggers, who regularly write for the online paper, inevitably link to other online media sources and Web sites while stating their opinions and showing their references. While such out-bound links may send readers away from the site and reduce the number of ads they can see on washingtonpost.com, they deem the opinion content rich, dynamic and credible.

• Those companies that send socially-optimized press releases with RSS feeds and links to consumer reviews disclose public discussions around their products. They understand that journalists who like to do their research online will uncover these bits of information anyhow. By taking the lead in presenting information from multiple sources, they earn journalists’ trust and have an opportunity to communicate their perspective.

In the new media order, information will compete and rivals will collaborate.

Could this be the language included in a future casting call?

MTV might think so. The network that built a remarkable brand in the "traditional" media world continues its march to mash-up popular cable television content and characters with virtual worlds. MTV execs call it "4D".

Yesterday, MTV leaders presented their vision for the future at the Virtual Worlds 2007 conference in New York. It's a future of merged content between one-way and two-way channels. And they're off to a good start.

The Viacom-owned media group already operates its own company-created-and-maintained virtual social networks based on two television shows: Laguna Beach and The Hills. Another -- based on Pimp My Ride -- is coming soon.

In these 3-D worlds, avid audience members can stroll through virtual landscapes which roughly relate to the real world depicted in the show, interact with other fans, and even bump into favorite characters (or at least, their avatars) from each television program.

[Above -- Lauren Conrad from MTV's "The Hills" appears on the television show and in the network's virtual world.]

By creating its own virtual environment from scratch, MTV has complete control over the surroundings (though they encourage loads of limited customization and personalization of and by visitors). It's a stark contrast to the community-built, "open" Second Life colony, in which marketers are often shunned for overstepping their ground into user-created spaces with overt branding. With MTV's owned virtual worlds, visitors expect some level of brand interaction.

It's a marketer's dream. Latch on to a successful media property, then interweave your brand appropriately into the audience's interaction with the show. Pepsi, for example, is offering fun branded props that virtual world visitors can use -- logo-adorned hoverboards, virtual soft drinks, etc. It's a natural extension of product placement happening in traditional media for years. And it's working because companies aren't solely slapping their brandmark on walls -- they're adding value to the experience by giving you tools you can use, sponsoring in-world events, etc.

In fact, the presence of logos and marketing messages doesn't seem to be driving audiences away. According to CNET News, 64 percent of users come back regularly, users visit 1.4 times per week for an average of 37 minutes each time, and users have so far logged more than 72 million minutes in-world. Not a bad extension for short television programs and probably why other big marketers like P&G and Cingular (now AT&T) have also jumped into MTV's virtual worlds.

This is just the beginning. It's safe to say we'll see scores more social media and entertainment property mash ups in the future.

The big question remaining for PR pros: Does your résumé include virtual networking and publicity skills yet?