Everyone is a publisher now, not just media companies. Nothing new there.

But what do people, companies and the media value when they create new blogs, micro-sites, online communities, etc?

Feedback.

Feedback can mean many things, whether it's comments, link love, web traffic, etc. This is valuable, to show that your initiatives have traction or engagement among certain targeted audiences. But what happens when your feedback gets captured only on a "third party" aggregator site?

This happening more and more as discussions occur in places like Friendfeed and not in the places where content orginiates. Union Square Ventures VC Fred Wilson has this to say, "...the people who create social media content; the bloggers, the twitterers, the commenters, the youtubers, the flickrers, etc, etc are doing this for a reason. Feedback. And without their content, none of these companies would have a business."

By "these companies," Wilson is referring to Friendfeed and Twitter, among others. Now, Wilson does have somewhat of a vested interest, given that he has invested in Disqus, the third party comment system, which tracks user's comments across all sites, and would like to see engagement and conversation occur where content originates, and not on aggregator sites.

However he has also invested in Twitter, which he says is, "part of the problem."

What does this have to do with PR, you say? Well, as Chris Anderson told us at the recent Mediabistro Circus conference, "community is easy to say, hard to do."