Emerging forms of media like podcasts, RSS, blogs and social networking may not be on everyone’s radar – but they’re on the rise, and the media relations world needs to take notice.

One of the biggest things that we’ve learned through interacting with these emerging media outlets is the importance of participation.

You don’t talk about it. You do it.

And the more you do it, the more you understand it.

As these forms of media continue to grow, we see the emergence of new thought leaders, new evangelists, new critics. It’s a fascinating phenomenon.

With those things in mind, we just launched an experiment that was designed to help us better understand user generated content – the material produced by (and made available to) the masses by sites like YouTube, MySpace, and the rest of the Blogosphere.

The experiment is in the form of a video parody of Fox’s hit TV show 24. (Apologies to those unfamiliar with the show – the piece’s “humor” comes from lampooning some of the signature elements of the show.) We produced it and launched it on YouTube.com the day after the show’s season finale. You can see it by clicking the link below (some may be able to access at the bottom of this post as well):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFTTDz-HH8g

So far, in the first 24 hours, there have been over 1300 views of the 90-second clip. That’s over 30 hours of viewing in total.

It seems significant (not necessarily by itself). But when you consider the number of videos that are posted to the site each day (multiplied by the number of viewings of each one), you start to realize that user generated content is worth paying attention to.

Stay tuned for more as this experiment continues to unfold.