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microcontent reuse
This is an attempt to clarify the use of the word "microcontent" and in so doing explain some important concepts about the world of content development. Feel free to edit and add to this article. If you have particular expertise in microcontent, please add to this page!Contents
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Summary
Microcontent refers to small, granular, and possibly representative (that can provide a summary of or a navigation to a larger set of information) bits of information, typically available on the Web. An example in the domain of journalism might be headlines and news summaries, small bits of content that can be used on a front page of the news with links to more in-depth articles. The definition has grown in scope as much as in its application. As posts on web sites become smaller, it can represent pieces of information on weblogs, Webzines, email digests, and Web ads, where small modules of information are presented for consumption. It might also refer to the metadata that can point to a more complete set of content. The lower limit to the size of what would be considered microcontent might be anywhere from a few words of a summary (as an article abstract for a published journal) all the way down to a single character (if it represents a letter in a hyperlinked glossary, or a number as a link to a part or price).The term "microcontent" is important not so much because it is a technical term that needs a precise definition or needs clear examples to delineate it from, say, "macrocontent" or "nanocontent" (because there are no such words), but because it is an indication that we are moving more toward seeing content as something that can be modularized, packetized, not just in our use of communication technology but also in the very activity of human communication. It is more a trend than it is tool.
Microcontent used to mean headlines or tag lines in a narrow sense — small pieces of eye-catching content that draw you to read further and deeper. But now it is used to describe the shift away from big pre-planned Web sites toward organically developed blogs and other places on the Web with small pieces of autonomous content. The small size of a chunk of meaningful content is not a new concept. What is new is the mind-shift away from everything tied together ahead of time (as in a self contained help system or Web site) and toward a sea of previously unconnected pieces of content.
First coined by Anil Dash, http://www.anildash.com/magazine/2002/11/introducing_the.html, the term microcontent has gone on to evolve in its meaning. In the older use of the word, Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for September 6, 1998:Microcontent: How to Write Headlines, Page Titles, and Subject Lines 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." Ann Wylie, president, Wylie Communications Inc., wrote "How to write microcontent — headlines, decks, buttons and links — that gets the word out on the Web" http://www.wyliecomm.com/press_room/tipsheet_micro.shtml. These are examples of the older use of the term.
Now whole Web sites are dedicated to the newer notion of an autonomous piece of content that can be uniquely linked. "The Corante Weblog covers the microcontent sector: weblogs, Webzines, email digests, and personal publishing... as well as how weblogs combine to form the Blogosphere." http://www.microcontentnews.com
Some have gone on to say that the "emerging microcontent revolution that is reshaping the Web." http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2003/12/defining_microc.html. Despite the marketing hyperbole, microcontent is a term that will continue to evolve and a trend that is worth watching.
Just as the author of this page (http://ajaxpatterns.org/wiki/index.php?title=Microcontent) thought about the use of the word microcontent, ("I hesitated to use "Microcontent" ..."), so I have similar misgivings about using it. But whether we say microcontent or chunks or modules of content, we are talking about our content in a way that is different qualitatively from how we talked about it in the past.
We need a better presentation of this key word.
Maybe after completing this article, let's update the microcontent page on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcontent
and add this page and some of the links on this page to that Wikipedia page.
originated by Bill Albing
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