There's some really fascinating chatter out there about the presentation layer of the Web 2.0 experience - specifically from John Gruber at Daring Fireball. I think as interactive developers, it provides some interesting insight into the psyche of the user - and how content is driving everything. The bottom line: Flash is not the only solution out there for rich web experiences.

According to Daring Fireball, there seems to be a trend afoot amongst visitors to the compendium website LifeHacker.com. Here's what she found from the mixed readership of both Mac and Windows users: of the 39 million visitors to LifeHacker.com per month, the number of users WITHOUT Flash installed nearly tripled from 2.32% in 2006 to 6.07% in 2009.

Wow. That's a dip. So what does it mean?

I think it's too early to draw conclusions, but with HTML 5 in the works (an editing partnership between Ian Hickson of Google and David Hyatt of Apple) and the proliferation of jQuery as a lightweight, cross-browser JavaScript library, I think we're seeing some changes ahead. I still believe that Flash will remain an ideal development environment for complex presentations and demos. But as presentation portals for websites? I think we've already seen the dissipation of the Flash-based website as a paradigm, with content driving the way. It stands the reason that we're heading for even more content-rich design architectures.

As marketers, we want to deliver sizzle with our sales. I think we have ample opportunity to deliver that with the continued innovation on the web. But content is king, and I believe the erosion of Flash in this example may be a bellweather of change.