On Microcontent. Mash-upMagazine.

on microcontent
a mash-up journal

First notion of “microcontent” at SXSW 2001 Panel:

2001 SXSW Interactive Festival Panel Grid

http://web.archive.org/web/20010331060131/http://www.sxsw.com/2001/interactive/panels/panels20
01.shtml
…
“Microcontent: Beyond the Web Page
Authoring, organizing, managing and distributing chunks of information on the web.

Lance Arthur (Glassdog.com)

David Galbraith (Moreover.com)
Jason Kottke, moderator (Kottke.org)
Evan Williams (Pyra)”

>> Peter Merholz, Anil Dash, Thomas Vander Wal were there

-------------------------------------

Peter Merholz, March 18, 2001 [SXSW notes] - peterme blog

http://www.peterme.com/browsed/browsed030101.html

"Conversation" is one of those concepts you can't get away from right now. Most famously promoted
by the Cluetrain clique ("markets are conversations"), it's popping up all over.

Alice May Clark, of Monkey Media, approached the subject from a sociological perspective--how
people 'design' their identities online, and the nature of online community spaces. She provided the
best URLs for the talk, from the infamous Peter Pan guy to Boycrazy.com.

Joey Anuff, editor at Plastic, finished off by discussing the deliberations he and Steven Johnson
made when choosing the base technology for the site. Originally enamored of the deep self-
organization of Everything2.com, they realized its unwieldy interface made using it too difficult. They
settled on Slashcode, the source for Slashdot, which they subsequently modified.

Microcontent

This panel proved both compelling and frustrating. Participants David Galbraith (very smart guy from
Moreover.com), Lance Arthur, Bryan Boyer, and moderator Jason Kottke had difficulty defining the
topic, and the discussion occurred in fits and starts, never finding its groove.

The place to start thinking about microcontent is Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox where he coined the term,
stating that microcontent is information that refers to macrocontent; headlines, page titles, etc. Paul
Meagher expanded the meaning to include any content that can be produced with relatively little
effort at regular intervals.

I find the referential definition of microcontent uninteresting, in large part because it's nothing new--
we've had headlines, abstracts, bestseller lists, and any number of other kinds of 'referring'
microcontent for a while.

What excites me, though, is microcontent qua microcontent. Some worthwhile ideas
simply don't need more than, oh, 500 words, and before the net, the economies of
publishing meant that such content would not get distributed. (Exceptions existed in
 On Microcontent. Mash-upMagazine. 2

magazines and newspapers, but such microcontent would be published only alongside longer content
that warranted such costs.)

Now, the atomic unit of feasibly publishable text is no longer the "page," but the "post,"
which could be as small as one word. The growing popularity of weblogs demonstrates what
happens as the barrier to entry lowers. Though largely dreck, there's a wealth of ideas being
brought forth that before would never have seen the light of day. …

Thomas Vander Wal, Off the Top

http://www.vanderwal.net/random/2001_03_01_archive.html

Thursday, March 15, 2001

Great Georgetown game!!! I think I disturbed my neighbors as I was yelling (happy yelling) about the
outcome at the last second.

The transition back to work from SXSW has been very difficult. The Austin experience was filled with
sharing with people with like minds that really are passionate about the Internet as a communication
tool. Many of us there have very similar stories and frustrations from work. There were so many
nodding heads it felt like a revival meeting or an addicts support group (just suppositions). Now back
in the real world the difference is more than noticeable. Clients wanting to know why pieces of the
project have not moved forward when they have not review and approved the components that have
been sitting in their desk, e-mail (flagged), and IM reminders hounding them three weeks.
Programmers making assumptions as to how things are done that are not on target. It was a long and
frustrating day to say the least. I was extremely tired so I was a little on edge which did not help.

I was also feeling badly that I was tired and did not offer congratulations to Lane on the accepted
proposal from Cory. I was enjoying a great conversation with him and his mother when this slipped in.
I picked up my gaff from ..... site.

One of my more memorable (non-panel) entertaining moments was singing the "Tiki Room Theme"
with Cory Doctorow and ... I met so many wonderful people at SXSW it is hard to capture all of them,
and there are some whom I did not completely catch, like the balcony conversation with a couple
people trying to live off the grid in conversation with others who did not mind offering his personal
information to get better service. There were great discussions after the panels. Many of the panels
and ensuing discussions nearly blew my head off, the were some of the most incredible
discussions that cracked my mind open to new idea in the "microcontent panel". Getting to
meet and thank Jeffery Zeldman, Jeffery Veen, and Nathan Shedroff for the years of resources and
guidance their web writings have provided me was great.

I got to tie faces and live personalities to some of the weblog I read (which I started reading in trying
to live vicariously in San Francisco. I was a little surprised with the depth of many of the folks, I have
not really come to terms with why I was surprised.

I must sleep.
posted at 7:58 PM #

Saturday, March 17, 2001

Sure I have the plane tixs, the room receipt, the rental car return form, the SXSW badge, but this
proves I was there at SXSW. I am talking to Mr. MetaFilter him self, Matt.

... Found myself LOL at Lance this morning. I was thoroughly entertained by Lance in Austin. He was
very funny in on the Microcontent Panel (which was a fantastic mind expanding panel
which threw my synapses in overdrive).

.…
 On Microcontent. Mash-upMagazine. 3

---
 On Microcontent. Mash-upMagazine. 4

Anil Dash, The Microcontent Browser (2001)

Dashes, 19 Mar 2001
http://www.dashes.com/anil/2001/03/the-microconten.html

Over at peterme (now with green!) the site's eponymous author offers some SXSW thoughts, which I
point to only because he summed up very well two of the panels we both attended, the Microcontent
and Starting a Web Business From Scratch discussions.

Regarding his comment on Microcontent:

“Now, the atomic unit of feasibly publishable text is no longer the "page," but the "post," which
could be as small as one word.”

He's on to something here... I mentioned it right after the panel, and then later at the Adaptive Path
party when I was in one of my "I'm going to talk over you because I just thought of something cool"
moods. What we might (I say might) need is a microcontent browser, which zips between items of
content that are smaller than the page unit. I don't know how it would work, or what it would look
like, or what the technological underpinnings would be. Yet. So, I'll come back to that later.

And, once again proving myself incapable, or at least unwilling, to engage in intellectual discourse,
Peter and I drifted on Tuesday night to a discussion of a final product vs. the documentation and
detritus of the creative process needed to create that product. Now, I claimed to almost always like
the "making of" part a lot better than the final product, which isn't really a statement that needs
proof, but somehow we got into a discussion of proving whether a colophon exceeds a work's value.

So why am I incapable of intellectual discourse? Because Peter's cineaste corroboration for why a film
like Apocalypse Now can yield a superior documentary like Hearts of Darkness, but that it's an
exception, not the rule.

My illustration of a work and its creation being two parts of a superior whole? "Making Michael
Jackson's Thriller".

Posted on Monday, March 19, 2001 at 6:16 AM

MICROCONTENT DEFINITION #1

Anil Dash, Introducing the Microcontent Client (2002)

(Not available anymore, full text archived)
http://www.anildash.com/magazine/2002/11/introducing_the.html
CACHED AVAILABLE at http://www.webcitation.org/5YEp7EfKa
…

“Microcontent is information published in short form, with its length dictated by the constraint of a
single main topic and by the physical and technical limitations of the software and devices that we use
to view digital content today. We've discovered in the last few years that navigating the web in
meme-sized chunks is the natural idiom of the Internet. So it's time to create a tool that's designed for
the job of viewing, managing, and publishing microcontent. This tool is the microcontent client. For
the purposes of this application, we're not talking about microcontent in the strict Jakob Nielsen
definition that's now a few years old, which focused on making documents easy to skim.

Today, microcontent is being used as a more general term indicating content that conveys one
primary idea or concept, is accessible through a single definitive URL or permalink, and is
appropriately written and formatted for presentation in email clients, web browsers, or on handheld
devices as needed. A day's weather forcast, the arrival and departure times for an airplane flight, an
abstract from a long publication, or a single instant message can all be examples of microcontent.”

…
 On Microcontent. Mash-upMagazine. 5

Anil dash, Posts are the atomic element of weblogs (2003)

Post in Blog "dashes", 2 July 2003.
http://www.dashes.com/anil/2003/07/posts-are-the-a.html

I'm very fortunate to get the chance to go around and talk to people who helped create the tools that
have shaped the weblog medium, and so I tend to notice trends in the way we're all talking about
weblogs. One of the recurring ideas that I've seen pop up in Meg's What We're Doing When We Blog,
in conversations with PB and in listening to presentations by Jason is that there's a consensus that the
atomic element of weblogs is the post, the single entry of a weblog.

When I first wrote up the idea that had been percolating in my mind for the microcontent client, the
one element that kept popping up was "meme-sized chunks [are] the natural idiom of the Internet". A
post is that memetic chunk, exactly the size of one idea. Not coincidentally, a lot of emails are that
size, as are a lot of instant messaging conversations.

And, as PB pointed out, the reverse chronological ordering of those posts creates an implicit social
contract. By putting the newest items first, you're promising your readers that your site will stay
current, with the enforcement of that promise being strengthened by the prominence of the date
itself.

But what I've been pondering lately is whether the reverse chronology is intrinsic or incidental to
weblogs. Sure, we've got categories and different ways of archiving, but is a weblog still a weblog if it
doesn't have a default view that's reverse-chronological?

It's probably a moot point. My email is still my mail regardless of how I choose to sort it. But I'm
somewhat concerned that we're not exploring (or maybe people are exploring it and I'm just not privy
to it) other ways of arranging data. Having been forced to make substantial use of a wiki for the first
time in my life lately, I can see that pervasive hyperlinking is so compelling that it makes wiki
enthusiasts willing to overlook the incredibly hard to use environment. And I can relate, as weblogs
were so compelling to me that I've been keeping one since the olden days when there were no tools
to make it easy.

But the idea of a broader view, with richer cross-categorization or even emergent categorization has
largely evaporated from the realm of weblog tools, and I'd love to hear people's ideas about how we
can bring it back. Or how you've been experimenting with the form. I know from keeping up my Daily
Links every day that date can sometimes be almost entirely irrelevant to a weblog post. Many of the
links I post are, deliberately, years old and not chronologically related to the ones that precede or
follow it. So what other ways should posts be arranged, and what are the implications of posts as
atomic weblog elements that we haven't understood yet?

Posted on Wednesday, July 2, 2003 at 3:48 PM

Comments:

PHIL WOLFF, Metaphor hell...

Posts are atoms.

Atoms come in various shapes and weights and have varied components. For a periodic table of
elements: The Component Blog. Microcontent in many forms.
Molecules are atoms combined. Their properties vary with their elements, organization, and how
everything is glued together. Think of this as a subset of a weblog. Maybe a channel, or posts with
inferred mutual relevance.
Throw enough atoms or molecules together, and you get complex things. Organisms, crystals,
buildings. Newsreaders, journals, blogs, photoblogs, wikiblogs, email clients, calendars, collaborative
blogs, vending machine blogs.
That's why the not-Echo project must provide a framework for
1. a rapidly growing table of periodic elements [not just the RSS .92 post structure],
2. attributes and protocols that permit more kinds of interconnection among various forms of
microcontent, and
 On Microcontent. Mash-upMagazine. 6

3. a basis for creating new systems and structures from the many microntent flavors and structures.
This is the path to the Adaptive Blogosphere.
Phil Wolff | July 6, 2003 5:54 PM | Reply

DANNY AYERS: Hi Anil,

I've been working on pretty much the same principle, with my meme-sized chunks being things like a
foaf:Person or rss:item. Yep, it's all RDF based. I think the human-friendly approach to the Big Graph
model is in such microcontent chunks. But I don't think it's essential to consider them at a micro-
level, being able to scale in a kind of fractal fashion opens up a lot of potential for data management.

But anyway, I've found that if you drop out of the idea of specific kinds of chunks, so any meme-
sized cluster can be used and this really open things up, especially your mind (man;-).

I've only been scratching the surface codewise (with my IdeaGraph project http://ideagraph.net) but
rarely a day goes by without a new idea occurring to me for something useful in this environment.
Danny | July 10, 2003 3:17 PM | Reply

----------------
Backlink
Richard McManus, Organizing weblogs by topic.
ReadWriteWeb July 4, 2003 11:03 PM

... Topics are different than categories. I use Radio Userland as my weblog authoring tool and I have
the option of dividing my posts into 'categories'. However I choose not to, because categories are too
broad and they aren't flexible. Anil Dash posted an entry today about posts being the "atomic
element" of weblogs:

"When I first wrote up the idea that had been percolating in my mind for the microcontent client,
the one element that kept popping up was "meme-sized chunks [are] the natural idiom of the
Internet". A post is that memetic chunk, exactly the size of one idea. Not coincidentally, a lot of emails
are that size, as are a lot of instant messaging conversations."

Topics can and should be "exactly the size of one idea", whereas categories usually encompass a
number of similar ideas. For example if I have a category called ".NET", then I may use it to file links
to information about ASP.NET, my thoughts on how .NET can be used to build a Universal Canvas,
how Microsoft is using .NET as the base for their next Operating System, etc. Many topics, but just
one category.

-----------------
InfoWorld Interview
Six Apart's degree of Weblog integration. Blog tools vendor positions itself for enterprise growth
Mark Jones interviews Anil Dash , October 14, 2003
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/10/14/HNanildash_2.html
...
"InfoWorld: … Looking ahead, what do you think will be the killer client application?

Dash: We have a long-term vision, which is something I generically describe as the micro content
client. Basically it says that all types of micro content are equivalent. Whether they're e-mail
messages, instant messaging messages, Weblog posts -- even Usenet -- [they] would have one
unified API and pieces can be shuttled between all the different contexts that you're in.

I think that's something where everybody likes to talk about the underused power of the desktop and
grids. One thing that might be useful in applying those ideas to Weblogs and managing Weblog
information is that the computers can be used to make connections and apply context to the data
that's being handled. But first I think we [need] to have a critical mass of data before people start to
make clients around it. So in the short term you're going to see integration with e-mail clients and
instant messaging, whatever people are using today."
 On Microcontent. Mash-upMagazine. 7

------------------------
NOVA SPIVACK

Minding the Planet, December 10, 2003

Defining Microcontent
http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2003/12/defining_microc.html

In my previous articles on the Birth of the Metaweb and the name "The Metaweb" I have focused on
the general paradigm of the emerging microcontent revolution that is reshaping the Web.

In a nutshell the Metaweb is not a new Web, rather it's a new evolution of the existing Web
comprised of interconnected microcontent objects. Let's unpack this definition.

The Metaweb contains the Web

The Metaweb is not a new Web, rather it is the next evolution of the existing Web. The Metaweb
includes the first Web (Web sites, Web pages, files and servers) as well as other Internet resources
and even resources on computers, cell phones, PDAs and other connected devices. It might be useful
to think of the first Web as "Web1" and the Metaweb as "Web2" -- Web2 contains yet extends Web1.
The Metaweb is the first step towards the future "Semantic Web."

The Metaweb is a distributed network

The Metaweb, like the Web, does not exist in one place. Rather it is a distributed system that is
chaotically organized from the bottom-up in a grassroots manner.

The Metaweb is comprised of microcontent objects

What is a "microcontent object?" Here is one attempt at a definition: It is a finite collection of

metadata and data that has at least one unique identity and at least one unique address on the
network, and that encapsulates no more than a small number of central ideas, where the number of
central ideas encapsulated is usually 1.

For example a Weblog posting is a microcontent object because it is a finite collection of metadata
(the fields of the posting as defined in XML or RDF) and data (the content of the posting), and it has
an identity and URL, and is generally focused on providing a small quantity of information about a
single central idea (although not always).

Contrast this with the concept of a "Web page" or a "Web site" and the distinction becomes a little
clearer. A Web site is a complex, compound collection of metadata and data that may be addressed
on a single domain-name, and that contains one or more information collections of unbounded size
where each sub-collection may itself comprise a Web page or another Web site. A Web site is
therefore "macrocontent" rather than "microcontent."

A Web page on the other hand is a little closer to the micro-level, but even here there is still a
distinction between a typical Web page and true "microcontent" -- namely that a Web page is not
limited to being "small" or to being focused around only a few central ideas (for example, consider the
home page of Yahoo -- this is a page but it is not microcontent).

Microcontent is a new class of content

Microcontent is "small content." That is, small, granular pieces of content, each with an unique
identity and URI, that may be published, subscribed to, and linked across the network.

Examples of microcontent include typical Weblog postings, RSS/Atom posts, discussion postings, Wiki
nodes, or database records that have their own URI's.
 On Microcontent. Mash-upMagazine. 8

If anyone would like to help to refine the definition of "microcontent" here, please feel free to add
comments to this article with your suggestions. I admit my definition could use some work, but it's
functional at least.

One important point that is worth debating: How essential is metadata to microcontent? Can
microcontent exist without containing metadata or is metadata the key to microcontent? In my
definition above I suggest that metadata is a requirement of microcontent, but that may or may not
be the case. Is the definition of microcontent merely that it is "small content" or is it "small self-
describing content"? What do you think?

December 10, 2003 in Web/Tech | Permalink ShareThis

Comments

Long ago, while I was learning folk tales at the University, I came across the
Aarne-Thompson Index of "Motifs". [> Popp ??] A motif may be an action, an item, a character, or
even a direct quote from the book. However, whatever that motif is, Aarne and Thompson have
identified it as an improtant characteristic of at least one folk tale. Their method involves
comparing the motifs present in the stories. Stories that have many of the same motifs are then
classified as related and given a number. This idea of taking the smallest unit of an idea
fascinated me ever since and the result is QTSaver, which arranges the same web motifs according to
different needs. Please see more details on my blog
http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Zeevveez | September 07, 2005 at 01:13 AM

>> “memes”, strukturalistische Text-Theorie

So is xpath like purple numbers? Are paragraphs within microcontent nanocontent?

Some people seem to be searching for something to treat as atomic. It's all holonic (things made up
of other things) of course, so in that framing we're looking for useful ways of chunking things. One
weblog page can have multiple items per day, and someone will want to be able to look at each day
*and* at each item in the day as pieces of microcontent.

A future with mix of explicitly and inferredly chunked stuff seems likely.

Will soon post a related item to http://ourpla.net/cgi/pikie?ObBlog

Posted by: John Abbe | February 06, 2004 at 01:39 PM

False dichotomy. For example: use an xpath statement as a parameter in a URL get. Now the content
can both be embedded and uniquely addressable.

Posted by: Lucas | December 15, 2003 at 06:48 PM

Actually, I am thinking about this some more... I think that microcontent should have a URI
because it should have a network identity. If it is merely marked up data then it cannot be
located on the network and could not even be said to be distinct from other content that it is
embedded in. There are many reasons why we might want microcontent to be distinct and
addressible even when embedded in other content.

Posted by: Nova Spivack | December 12, 2003 at 07:40 AM

Yes you raise a good point. I am going to modify my definition!

Posted by: Nova Spivack | December 12, 2003 at 07:26 AM

I am intrigued that you consider microcontent should necessarily have a URI. I have always thought
that something like 'event details' expressed in a suitably marked-up way containing
 On Microcontent. Mash-upMagazine. 9

information such as a 'name', 'time' and 'place' was a good candidate for microcontent.
Similarly its compactness also makes it a good candidate for copying around (as an email
attachment for example 'passed by value') which could then be unpacked by a helper application that
understands that particular type of microcontent.

Posted by: adrian cuthbert | December 12, 2003 at 06:50 AM

------------------

Minding the Planet, December 04, 2003

Nova Spivack, The Birth of "The Metaweb" -- The Next Big Thing -- What We are All Really
Building
http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2003/12/the_birth_of_th.html

Originally developed at Netscape, a new technology called RSS has risen from the dead to ignite the
next-evolution of the Net. RSS represents the first step in a major new paradigm shift -- the birth of
"The Metaweb." The Metaweb is the next evolution of the Web -- a new layer of the Web in fact --
based on "microcontent." Microcontent is a new way to publish content that is more granular, modular
and portable than traditional content such as files, Web pages, data records, etc.

On the existing Web, information is typically published in large chunks -- "sites" comprised of "pages."
In the coming microcontent-driven Metaweb, information will be published in discrete, semantically
defined "postings" that can represent an entire site, a page, a part of a page, or an individual idea,
picture, file, message, fact, opinion, note, data record, or comment.

Metaweb postings can be hosted like Web pages in particular places and/or they can be shipped
around the Net using RSS in a publish-subscribe manner. Webloggers for example create
microcontent every time they post to their blogs. Each blog posting is a piece of microcontent. End-
users can subscribe to get particular pieces of microcontent they are interested in by signing up to
track "RSS channels" using "RSS Readers" that poll those channels periodically for new pieces of
microcontent.

RSS resembles traditional "publish and subscribe" except that it scales to the entire Internet and is
based on new XML open standards. Unlike "push technology" RSS and the microcontent model is
based instead on "pull" -- just like the Web itself -- RSS Readers periodically poll sources for new RSS
content and pull it down instead of having it pushed at them. Thus, unlike push technology, with RSS
the control is in the hands of opt-in end-users. These differences, combined with RSS's use of open
HTTP protocols and XML/RDF formats have led to rapid adoption and viral spread of RSS technologies
-- principally within the Weblogging and information services communities. But that's about to change.

RSS is poised to become The Next Big Thing. There are many reasons for this -- for one thing, e-mail
is no longer useful as a content distribution, alerting and marketing medium. E-Mail's rapidly eroding
signal-to-noise ratio is leading content providers and end-users to seek alternative, more mutually-
effective avenues for interacting with one another. Another force that is driving RSS adoption is the
rise of Weblogging.

My projections indicate that within 5 years almost every Weblog will provide an RSS channel of its
content. In coming years a large percentage of consumers and professionals are expected to begin
blogging -- Weblogs are the new homepages; everyone should have one.

Within 5 years, if RSS grows as I expect, we will see it supplant e-mail as the primary alerting and
marketing channel for "B2C" communications. To put it simply, businesses and their customers both
benefit from interacting via RSS instead of e-mail for "1-way" interactions such as content publishing,
notifications, etc. Based on that, I predict that every medium to large corporate Web site and every
major publication and wire service, as well as an increasing number of enterprise applications and
services will publish and subscribe to numerous RSS channels. Already we see the beginning of this
with numerous major organizations embracing RSS from IBM, Microsoft and Sun to The New York
Times, ABC News and WIRED to name a few examples.
 On Microcontent. Mash-upMagazine. 10

So, 30 million bloggers at 1 feed each + 2 milllion small, medium and large businesses at an average
of 20 feeds each + 2 million web sites and information services providers at an average of 10 feeds
each + 10 major portals and online services at an average of 1,000,000 feeds each + 100 million
desktop and enterprise applications producing 1 feed each .... you can see where this is headed. To
be conservative let's assume that the numbers turn out to be less than what I project -- that is still 50
million to 100 million feeds online within 5 years. And that's a growth curve that looks a lot like the
first wave of the Web. Just as everyone "had to have" an e-mail account and a Web page, they will
also soon need and want to have an RSS reader and their own RSS channel. That's a big opportunity.

But RSS is just the first step in the evolution of the Metaweb. The next step will be the Semantic Web.
RSS begins the process of getting end-users and content providers to use metadata. The next step is
to make that metadata more interoperable, more understandable, more useful. This takes place using
ontologies and emerging tools for working with "semantic metadata" -- metadata for which formally
defined semantics exists. Just providing metadata is not enough -- the meaning of that metadata has
to be defined somewhere in a formal, rigorous, manner that computers can understand automatically.
The Semantic Web transforms data and metadata from "dumb data" to "smart data." When I say
"smart data" I mean data that carries increased amounts of information about its own meaning,
structure, purpose, context, policies, etc. The data is "smart" because the knowledge about the data
moves with the data, instead of being locked in an application. So the Semantic Web is a web of
"smart data" -- a Web of semantically defined metadata. The Semantic Web is already evolving
naturally from the emerging confluence of Blogs, Wikis, RSS feeds, RDF tools, ontology languages
such as OWL, rich ontologies, inferencing engines, triplestores, and a growing range of new tools and
services for working with metadata. But the key is that we don't have to wait for the Semantic Web
for metadata to be useful. The Metaweb is already happening. RSS is already useful and it's
happening now.

As I write this on the leading edge of 2004 -- a little more than ten years after the Web began -- I am
aware that we are witnessing the birth of the next generation of the Net. I remember watching the
birth of the HTML-Web as a technology analyst/editor at Individual, Inc in the early 90's. My job was
to manage a collection of intelligent agents that scanned hundreds of newswires and content archives
to produce filtered strategic newsfeeds for major customers. My beat was "emerging technologies" --
every night I had to Q-A the output of my agents by reading around 1400 articles and press releases
about new technologies in a 4 hour period.

It was in the midst of that firehose of information that I noticed the birth of HTML and HTTP, the rise
of early hypertext systems, the first browsers -- and I realized that "something big" was afoot. At the
beginning the pattern wasn't evident from reading individual articles -- only by reading 1400 articles a
night could one see the early meme-signatures of the HTML-Web flashing across hundreds of media
outlets like a sequence of blinking Christmas-tree lights. That recognition led me to leave Individual
and co-found EarthWeb in 1994 -- because I wanted to be a part of building the Web, not just
watching it! Today, just like in 1994 with HTML, it is much the same situation and again I am back to
building again -- Radar Networks, our stealth venture, is developing a new platform for the Metaweb
that will open up a range of new capabilities for sharing metadata.

The baby Metaweb has already been born, but so far only the early-adopters and Web-veterans have
noticed it. To those who "were there" the first time around there is a recognizable feeling of
momentum -- of "something big" happening again. It's going to be a fun ride!

Notes:

1. A new syndication format based on RSS is being proposed as an open standard. Called Atom it
promises to provide a vendor neutral, extensible format for weblogging.

2. Why the term "Metaweb"? A reader suggested that the prefix "Meta" was too technical for
consumers. I don't think so however -- after all they use the term "Internet" without any problem and
that is not exactly a consumer-friendly word when you think about its meaning and origin. The
concept of the Metaweb is that it is a new layer of the existing Web, that's why the name should really
contain "Web" in it.
 On Microcontent. Mash-upMagazine. 11

3. Here is a good timeline on the history and origins of RSS

December 04, 2003 in Artificial Intelligence, Business, Collaboration Tools, Collective Intelligence,
Group Minds, Intelligence Technology, Knowledge Management, Memes & Memetics, My Best Articles,
Semantic Web, Society, Technology, The Future, Web/Tech, Weblogs | Permalink

----------------------

Larry McCallum, What’s in a Word? Microcontent and its discontents

Human Jungle. December 6, 2007
http://twistedskein.blogspot.com/2007/12/whats-in-word-microcontent-and-its.html

Evocative, with just a whiff of zeitgeist, “microcontent” would seem to be a word whose time has
come. Wikipedia states that the term was “systematically introduced and defined” in 2002 by Anil
Dash as content “formatted for presentation” in small contexts, whether email clients, Web browsers
or handheld devices. However, the word was coined at least four years earlier when Web design
theorist Jakob Nielsen described microcontent more in terms of its extreme brevity and its descriptive
and attention-grabbing purposes – headlines, subject tags and links of just forty to sixty characters,
“pearls of clarity” intended to describe fuller content, i.e. “to explain your macrocontent” (1998).

Without explicitly defining the word, Bryan Alexander uses “microcontent” liberally in his essay “Web
2.0: a new wave of innovation for teaching and learning?” (2006). In so doing, he suggests vastly
wider and more insidious implications for the term. At first mention, Alexander (right) italicizes the
word (either for emphasis or to underscore its foreignness) and equates microcontent with the
“content chunks” that populate the social Web and set Web 2.0 apart from “the Web as book”. In
other words, microcontent defines the Social Web. These discreet chunklets – brief text, a
single photograph, etc. – can be shared, shuffled, merged and aggregated.

Microcontent, then, isn’t merely brief. It is content divorced from any container, whether
“book” or webpage. Alexander apparently rejects Dash’s notion that microcontent is “formatted” at
all. Users “personalize their bit of del.icio.us…with a minimally designed page” (Alexander, 2006).
Textual microcontent possesses no visual form of its own – no layout, no font; it is
amorphous, meant for extrusion and moulding. Alexander implies as much when he asks,
“when will enough readers peruse Web sites through RSS and other microcontent readers to warrant
resigning campus public electronic presentations?” (2006). He seems to suggest that
“presentation” is strictly client-side – determined by the bland mould of the RSS reader or email
client – and that this stands to render the static page (including its design and presentation)
irrelevant, at which point publishers of information can abandon (or as he puts it, “resign”) these
efforts altogether.

This is a giant leap and stands to cut an entire layer of expression and communication out of
the picture – the “formal” layer of layout, typography, the synergy of text + image. These
visual attributes are, of course, a legacy of print; Web 1.0 had been evolving into a collection of
opulent magazines (and many poorly designed ones). The Web 2.0 paradigm of microcontent on-the-
fly gives rise to sameness and efficiency via a limited number of generic, monotonous templates (for
example, the one enclosing this very blog posting). The publisher loses control over aesthetic and
communicative complexity and individuality.

Alexander rightly notes that “users have generated this material for decades” (2006).
Indeed, content in general has been scaling down, as evident, for example, in news, where
the public’s appetite for television-news brevity gave rise to USA Today’s shorter, informal style and
likewise a greater quotient of “bites” in magazines and newspapers generally. However,
microcontent’s mobility goes a stage further in redefining mass media. One needn’t “go to” the
NewYorkTimes.com when one can set up feeds that excise portions of that newspaper from the whole
and pull those chunks to one’s desktop. Thus whereas the Times’ website emulates the print
newspaper’s ability to organize content visually, with size (e.g. headline) and placement (e.g. top of
page, front of newspaper), the feed eliminates that organization entirely – and the majority of content
along with it. The reader no longer scans the “world today” as determined by professionals working
 On Microcontent. Mash-upMagazine. 12

for corporations; rather, he pre-selects his subject areas, allows algorithms to cherry-pick his content
from various sources, and largely tunes out. As we scan Bloglines instead of individual newspapers,
our worldview becomes increasingly specialized and blinkered.

Meantime, for those who still visit newspapers, the Times increasingly features “blog” articles,
distinguishable from news or traditional commentary less by their brevity than their chatty informality,
up-to-the-second breathlessness, and openness to user comments. Thus, microcontent assumes
its own aesthetic parameters. Though written by professional journalists, these blog
entries conform to the style of the blogosphere, e.g. off-the-cuff opinion replete with
typos and other errors, giving them a street-level authenticity lacking in heavily structured
and edited news copy. Microcontent reflects a society both levelled by democracy and disillusioned
with power structures. It also suggests a reassertion of latent orality.

The “lowered barrier[s] to entry” make it far easier to generate or read microcontent
“than beginning an article or book” (Alexander, 2006). We now “find our own micro-audiences
among friends and colleagues; we self-reference and share” (McCallum, 2007). Indeed, a conceit of
microcontent is its promise of turning us all into writers and editors – even into librarians, given the
rise of folksonomy, which is itself microcontent in that tags shrink the catalogue record (or
citation) down to personal informality, subverting librarian notions of “authority record” and “authority
control” and replacing them with democratic (and, again, amorphous) tag clouds.

The question might be: can we trust ourselves in place of professionals. Like the term “microcontent”,
“factoid” is a word of ambiguous usage, connoting both brief fact and dubious claim.
(When Norman Mailer coined it in the early 1970s, he meant lurid, distortional journalism.)
Microcontent may assume similar baggage, as shared and shuffled ‘chunks’ become increasingly
decontexualized, their origins suspect. Alexander and others herald microcontent’s potential in social
learning and fostering expression among students. But it also poses educational challenges. As
fragmented and fluid social currency, microcontent can undermine important concepts like
intellectual property, not to mention personal accountability, gravitas, and the finality of
a finished product, all of which demand (and teach) care and precision (McCallum 2007). The
bigger challenge is "getting social software adopted in meaningful ways within schools" (Sessums,
2006).

Alexander, Bryan. "Web 2.0: a New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?." Educause. Mar.-
Apr. 2006. 28 Nov. 2007 .
McCallum, Larry. "Re:Connection of Web2.0 and Pedagogy." Making Connections. 5 Dec. 2007. 5 Dec.
2007 .

Sessums, Christopher D. "Cultural Implications of Social Software, Teaching, and Learning: Ready or
Not." Eduspaces. 20 Dec. 2006. 2 Dec. 2007 .

Posted by Larry at 11:14 AM

Labels: blogging, microcontent, social Web, Web 2.0

Bryan's workshop blog said...

This is a fine meditation on microcontent. I appreciate the response to my article, and am delighted
that you discerned the "insidious" nature of my use of the term.
Two caveats: first, I wouldn't say microcontent is beyond *all* formatting, since non-textual media
necessarily exist within forms (mp3, jpg).
Second: "resigning" is a typo, or spellcheck error. I intended "redesigning," and should have caught
that in the galley.
"microcontent assumes its own aesthetic parameters" is a very powerful observation. It's an
emergent aesthetic.
Care and precision - my shorthand answer to that very important challenge is pedagogy.
December 8, 2007 4:18 AM

jurij m. lotman said...

since my blog doesn't seem to work,

 On Microcontent. Mash-upMagazine. 13

a short summary of my thoughts on "microcontent" & "micromedia" can be found here.

Indeed i think the concept deserves some more discussion. Just two fast points, from my
perspective: The basic aim and reason of existence for microcontent is circulation. For this, the double
character of microcontent is important: which has to be micro for both human & machine. For the
machine (self-contained, individually adressable, appropriately formatted for re-use & re-aggregation),
for the author (just some clicks to produce & publish), for the consumer (just a small unit of
"continuous partial attention", one glance & some seconds time, for video/audio probably up to the
classical pop single format of 3:00 minutes approximately) ...
December 9, 2007 3:38 PM

---------------------------------------

UMAIR HAQUE

Microcontent and micromedia are very small, basic units of digital content or media “that can be
consumed in unbundled microchunks . . . and aggregated and reconstructed in hyperefficient ways”
(Haque 2005, slide 33).

Haque, U. 2005. The new economics of media: Micromedia, connected consumption, and the snowball
effect. http://www.bubblegeneration.com/resources/mediaeconomics.ppt (accessed May 31, 2008).
Archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5YEpAA0ZC.

-------------

MARTIN LINDNER, Micromedia & Microcontent

Martin Lindner (2008) Understanding Micromedia Convergence. Published in Kristof Nyiri (ed),
Integration and Ubiquity. Towards a Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence. Wien: Passagen
2008.
…
Before the internet-enabled cellphone, this kind of multitasking multimedia-experience had mainly
been restricted to the home. Now, with the small “fourth screen” of the mobile phone acting as a
“background device”, 1 micromedia is been taken to the streets.

To use many devices and interfaces at the same time, media have to be casual, “seamful”, and
“cool”. 2 This means that traditional media formats and contents will be fundamentally changed, and
many macromedia-based business plans will be shattered. 3 Content will have to become digital
“microcontent”, “with its length dictated by the constraint of a single main topic and by the physical
and technical limitations of the software and devices that we use […]”. 4

Anil Dash, a weblog visionary and businessman, gave the first definition of digital microcontent,
when he discovered in 2002 “that navigating the web in meme-sized chunks is the natural idiom of
the Internet.” 5 The double nature is crucial: Microcontent is both human and technological. It is the
basic ‘unit of attention’ (“meme-sized”) in digital networked media, and it is a chunk of digital data
formatted in a way that allows easy production, aggregation, annotation, and re-use. 6

1
Charlie Schick, “What are the true qualities of mobility?” (2005), Entry in Weblog Lifeblog. URL:
http://cognections.typepad.com/lifeblog/2005/09/what_are_the_tr.html
2
See Lindner, op.cit., for a closer look at the concepts of casual and cool media, and the notion of
“seamfulness” (Matthew Chalmers).
3
Umair Haque, “The New Economics of Media. Micromedia, Connected Consumption, and the Snowball Effect”
(2005). This is a Powerpoint-essay published at Haque’s weblog bubblegeneration, URL:
http://www.bubblegeneration.com/resources/mediaeconomics.ppt
4
Anil Dash, “Introducing the Microcontent Client” (2002). URL:
http://www.anildash.com/magazine/2002/11/introducing_the.html
5
Dash, op.cit.
6
Lindner, op.cit.
 On Microcontent. Mash-upMagazine. 14

We are now witnessing a ‘Cambrian explosion’ of mostly mobilized microcontent applications,

including text/presence (e.g. Jaiku), pictures/graphics (e.g. Flickr), videos (e.g. YouTube), Web radio
(e.g. Pandora, LastFM …), ‘geo-bookmarks’ (Socialight, Qype …), user-generated micro-video (Qik),
micro-audio (Utterz) .... From this soup new cultural forms will crystallize. It is still very early, and
predictions are difficult. But some points about micromedia convergence can be made:

ƒ In the future, the mobile phone will become a main microcontent client for consuming,
recording, producing, annotating, aggregating, publishing. It will be a main part in a
foodchain.

ƒ The micromedia space is based on circulation, not on communication, transmission, or

consumption. It will neither be a 3D ‘virtual world’ nor the seamless space of the visionaries of
“pervasive computing”. Written text will merge with voice and visual elements to create new
cultural forms beyond the old notions of orality and literacy.

ƒ Micromedia design will have to understand concepts like “lifestreams” (David Gelernter),
“points of presence” (Kingsley Idehen, Martin Lindner), “personal and local info-clouds”
(Thomas Vander Wal), “seamfulness” (Matthew Chalmers), and “user experience flows” for
“Continuous Partial Attention” (Linda Stone). 7
Beyond outdated visions of techno-futurists, and fulfilling the old promise of electric media, the mobile
phone will help to transform ‘real life’ through the open, dynamic, unpredictable, virus-like, and
ubiquitous circulation of micromedia.
…

---------------------
Martin Lindner (2008) MicroDesign – A Conceptual Framework for Designing ‘Smart Applications’ in
Emerging Ubiquituous Micromedia Environments. In: Martin Lindner, Peter A. Bruck (eds.), Microlearning
and Capacity Building. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference Microlearning2008
(Innsbruck/Austria, June 25 – 27). Innsbruck: Innsbruck University Press, 2008.
…
Micromedia and Microcontent
The new digital media environments are micromedia environments. ‘Media’ is here to be understood in
a threefold sense: (a) as media technologies: technological systems for (mass) sign transmission and
circulation; (b) as media content: content formatted for transmission and circulation; (c) as media
space: the immersive environment created by media in the sense of (a) and (b).
There seem to be some independent tendencies towards micromedia and microcontent. As McLuhan
(2001) noted, electric media (telegraphy, telephony) changed the press from the start, replacing the
long written essays of printed journals with the highly fragmented “mosaic” of news and ads. Over the
long range, in radio and TV a similar shift from standalone, elaborate pieces towards a temporal
‘mosaic’ of small units (clips, news, pop songs …) can be observed.
Since digital technology has turned “media” in the mid-90Ts, two parallel trends toward an ever more
rapid circulation of ever smaller pieces of content have shown:
First, with small-sized handheld devices, especially phones-with-screens, we have seen a remarkable
comeback of media technologies that are characterized by [relatively] low resolution, low fidelity, and
slow speeds (Manovich 2000), as opposed to broadband and multimedia technologies that are aiming
toward ‘more’ (“more resolution, better color, better visual fidelity, more bandwidth, more
immersion”). And Manovich prophesized with respect to networked cell phones that “minimalist media
or micro-media” would “not only successfully compete with macro-media but may even overtake it in
popularity” (ibid.). This has to do with the different subject position these personal media are opening
for the individuals.

7
Ibid.
 On Microcontent. Mash-upMagazine. 15

Second, even on the larger screens of the PC content now tends to become microcontent. After
Google had been shreddering the macro-content of the document-/page-based Web 1.0 to ‘small
pieces loosely joined’ (Weinberger 2002), the Web 2.0 is now consisting mainly of clouds of small
content clips. They are ‘small’ in respect to the space they need on the screen, in the system’s
memory, and in respect to the time the processing consumes within the computational system
(download time) and the human mind (attention span). Avant-gardists of the Web 2.0 noted this
tendency as soon as 2002, leading to the still valuable definition of Dash (2003):
Microcontent is information published in short form, with its length dictated by the constraint
of a single main topic and by the physical and technical limitations of the software and
devices that we use to view digital content today. We've discovered in the last few years that
navigating the web in meme-sized chunks is the natural idiom of the Internet.
Dash’s further definition can be systematically boiled down to three points which apply to the level of
machines as well as to the level of human users. (See Lindner (2006b) for more details and
references.) Microcontent is
„ self-contained – the smallest unit that can stand for itself in computational, mental and socio-
cultural contexts;
„ individually addressable for computers (through ‘permalinks’) and humans (through their
rhetorical ‘meme’-quality);
„ appropriately formatted for easy consumption and further re-use (like e.g. ‘microformats’ and
the convention of ‘blog posts’ both oscillatting between cultural form and machine-readable
format).
This matches well with the definition the Web economist Umair Haque has been given for
“micromedia”. He is concentrating on the radical impact of new microcontent-based technologies,
applications and services on traditional mass media, especially the news and the music industry.
According to him, in the context of an emerging highly dynamic, open and fragmented digital
“attention economy”, “micromedia” (plural) are digital atomized media “that can be consumed in
unbundled microchunks and aggregated and reconstructed in hyperefficient ways.” (Haque 2005)
This paradigm change is transforming the whole ecosystem of content production, reception and
circulation. Whether we like it or not (and there are reasons for both), micromedia and microcontent
will not go away. This poses two main challenges:
„ How can human ‘microinformation experiences’ become integrated into the complex context
which is formed by the usage of one device (or the simultaneous usage of multiple devices),
by the workflow, by the personal flow of tasks (be it professional or private), and finally by
the socio-cultural context of the media being used?
„ What forms of guidance and steering could possibly be designed to feel natural for a
micromedia user?
To meet these challenges, new patterns of attention and focus will have to be fully understood and
considered.
…
To put it in headlines: Web 2.0 applications will have to be designed
„ for micromedia technologies, devices and circulation systems optimized for transmitting and
processing content in the form of meme-sized microcontent-chunks;
„ for dramatically different patterns of attention and developing along with the simultaneous
use of digital information sources and applications;
„ for new, complex structures of the digital environment, enhanced by peripheries and
background, allowing for different kinds of focus and ‘peripheral view’;
„ in the form of interfaces for modular lightweight micro-applications, that are combining
perceived simplicity, flow-quality and gesture-driven directness with the enriching seamfulness
abstract ‘sign layers’ are adding to the lifeworld.
 On Microcontent. Mash-upMagazine. 16

…
Continuous Partial Attention
“Continuous partial attention is a post-multitasking adaptive behaviour. Being connected makes us feel
alive. ADD [Attention Deficit Disorder] is a dysfunctional variant of continuous partial attention.
Continuous partial attention isn't motivated by productivity, it's motivated by being connected.”
Such Linda Stone (2005) lately defined the influential term she herself had coined as early as 1998,
while being a researcher for Microsoft. She was one of the first proposing a positive perspective on a
phenomenon that still is mostly discussed as alarmed account of the dangers for productivity posed by
“multitasking”, “distraction”, and “life interrupted”. 8 Like Bryant (2006) and Brown/Duguid (1999),
Stone seems to assume that the experience of “Information Overload” typically occurs where outdated
organizational structures and psychological patterns are confronted with a new environment consisting
of differently structured (micro-)information.
…

---------------

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for September 6, 1998:

Microcontent: How to Write Headlines, Page Titles, and Subject Lines (1998)
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980906.html

Microcontent needs to be pearls of clarity: you get 40-60 characters to explain your macrocontent.
Unless the title or subject make it absolutely clear what the page or email is about, users will never
open it.

The requirements for online headlines are very different from printed headlines because they are used
differently. The two main differences in headline use are:

* Online headlines are often displayed out of context: as part of a list of articles, in an email
program's list of incoming messages, in a search engine hitlist, or in a browser's bookmark menu or
other navigation aid. Some of these situations are very out of context: search engine hits can relate to
any random topic, so users don't get the benefit of applying background understanding to the
interpretation of the headline. The same goes for email subjects.
* Even when a headline is displayed together with related content, the difficulty of reading online
and the reduced amount of information that can be seen in a glance make it harder for users to learn
enough from the surrounding data. In print, a headline is tightly associated with photos, decks,
subheads, and the full body of the article, all of which can be interpreted in a single glance. Online, a
much smaller amount of information will be visible in the window, and even that information is harder
and more unpleasant to read, so people often don't do so. While scanning the list of stories on a site
like news.com, users often only look at the highlighted headlines and skip most of the summaries.

Because of these differences, the headline text has to stand on its own and make sense when the rest
of the content is not available. Sure, users can click on the headline to get the full article, but they are
too busy to do so for every single headline they see on the Web. I predict that users will soon be so
deluged with email that they will delete messages unseen if the subject line doesn't make sense to
them.

If you create listings of other people's content, it is almost always best to rewrite their headlines. Very
few people currently understand the art of writing online microcontent that works when placed
elsewhere on the Web. Thus, to serve your users better, you have to do the work yourself.
Guidelines for Microcontent

8 For a first account of empiric research by the professors David Levy and Gloria Marks see for
example Seven (2004).
 On Microcontent. Mash-upMagazine. 17

* Clearly explain what the article (or email) is about in terms that relate to the user. Microcontent
should be an ultra-short abstract of its associated macrocontent.
* Written in plain language: no puns, no "cute" or "clever" headlines.
* No teasers that try to entice people to click to find out what the story is about. Users have been
burned too often on the Web to have time to wait for a page to download unless they have clear
expectations for what they will get. In print, curiosity can get people to turn the page or start reading
an article. Online, it's simply too painful for people to do so.
* Skip leading articles like "the" and "a" in email subjects and page titles (but do include them in
headlines that are embedded within a page). Shorter microcontent is more scannable, and since lists
are often alphabetized, you don't want your content to be listed under "T" in a confused mess with
many other pages starting with "the".
* Make the first word an important, information-carrying one. Results in better position in
alphabetized lists and facilitates scanning. For example, start with the name of the company, person,
or concept discussed in an article.
* Do not make all page titles start with the same word: they will be hard to differentiate when
scanning a list. Move common markers toward the end of the line. For example, the title of this page
is Microcontent: Headlines and Subject Lines (Alertbox).
* In email sent from your website, make the "From" field clarify the customer relationship and
reduce the appearance of spam or anonymous intrusion (but don't use the name of the customer
service rep. unless the user has actually established a relationship with that person: mail from
unknown people also has a tendency to be deleted and will be harder for users to find in a search).

Examples

Email subject: Opportunity

Makes the message seem like spam. A sure way to be deleted unread.
Email subject: Web Design Conference in Norway
Sounds like a conference announcement: would be deleted unread by somebody who doesn't plan
to travel to Norway any time soon. Better subject line: Invitation: Keynote speaker at Norwegian Web
Design Conference.
Email from line: musicblvd@musicblvd.com
Email subject: Your Music Boulevard Order
Not a horrible subject, but it would have been better to say Music Boulevard Order Shipped to You
Today (starting with an information-carrying word and being more precise than the original). The from
line should have included a human-readable name like Music Boulevard Customer Service
Page title: Big Blue and Wall Street too
Probably has something to do with investing in IBM, but people who don't know that nickname
would be at a complete loss and would never be attracted to clicking on this headline. Even people
who do realize that the story will be about IBM don't get told what's new or interesting in the article.
Page title: Reading your PC
Say again? What can this possibly be about? This is a real example (as are all the others) from a
major U.S. newspaper. It probably worked fine in print, but not in a listing of headlines on a third-
party website.
Page title: Sound Card Competition Heats Up
When shown on a computer-related site, this is a great headline. When placed out of context it
may be better to add a qualifier: Sound Card Competition Increases in PC Market. Note that the page
title will still work if the last part is chopped off in some listings.