Tournament: Consumer tech advance that most benefited PR

Keith O'Brien

September 26, 2008

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Hello, it's time for PRWeek's second competition of the year. This time, we're moving gingerly away from people and their blogs to try to find the best consumer-focused technological enhancement in the past ten years (NOTE: not considered for the competition are marketing-focused tools, like newswires, measurement services, etc.). We're going to open the selection process for the competition a bit. A steering committee of John Bell of Ogilvy, Steve Rubel of Edelman, and Tonya Garcia of PRWeek selected 14 of the 16 items.

We need you, the audience, to a) fact-check these to make sure that it's fair to say these technologies became popular from 1998-2008 (they could officially launch before 1998 - it's more about when consumers began to adopt them) and b) suggest the final two technologies to round out the tournament. You can send suggestions to prweekat10@prweek.com or leave them in the comments. After the jump, the 14 technologies.

Current slate

1. Podcasts

2. RSS

3. Camera phone

4. SMS

5. Wi-fi

6. Alternate-reality games

7. Virtual world sites (Second Life)

8. HDTV

9. Blogging software

10. Microblogging (i.e. Twitter)

11. Social network platforms (i.e. Facebook)