A massive amount of web 2.0 works on participation. Places like Facebook, Myspace and Flickr all require some form of participation from the user, who participate to create user generated content which the brands love. They put O'Reilly's point of the 'architecture of participation at the core of their design.
Dion Hinchcliffe's points out in his web 2.0 blog suggests its not a relatively new idea, but its how society is on the web today and how we are using the internet now.
"And yes, of course, none of this is actually new, it's really all about the sea changes in the way people are using and designing for the Web, much more than the Web itself. So it's less a technological change (though there are a few of those too) than a change in mindset and habit. Yet it's having a very real effect on the sites that people visit and how they produce and consume information on the Web. At the core of all this is collective intelligence, the user contributed information on a site that is its powerful draw; if it's the information they want that is. This can be user contributions in the form of text, images, audio, video, etc"
User generated content is created. Content which we want to see and something we love to contribute. Web 2.0 has made it easier for us to be able to participate much more frequently and easily, both through technologies and our own skills. We are becoming far more competent as users online, so uploading forms of text, images, audio, and video etc is made simpler even for the most of novice of users which encourages them to actually make a contribution.
Dion Hinchcliffe's ends his article on 'Architectures of Participation: The Next Big Thing' very well, explaining how this idea of allowing participation could become extremely popular for brands in the future.
"This is what is called innovation at the edge of the network, and it's an amazing phenomenon that all of us are learning to tap by crafting the designs of our sites with an effective architecture of participation. And I'll go on record, given the results so far, building competitive architectures of participation is almost certainly going to be one of the biggest topics in software design for the rest of the decade.
It's almost like an arms race, but soon everyone will have the tools and techniques. What will happen after that? Equilibrium?"
And viral advertising works on a similar model. They rely solely on participation from the user. As Hinchcliffe pointed out, we like to be a participant some way or another, and technologies and user skills have made it easier for us to do this. This allows viral video is be far more successful as users know how to send it, and have far more possible ways of even sending it.
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