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TV is MicroContent too

Marc Canter has a rant about the fact that the latest Apple does not contain a TV-tuner. Why should they put one in? That is so Web 0.2.

I do not know in the US, but in Europe (at least some places) we have got TV over the Internet. With a 8MB broadband connection you can watch all the regular French stations. And in the Netherlands there is a website called show_missed, where you can see all the shows that you might have missed.

So also TV is slowly turning into MicroContent and Apple might the right step by integrating that into iTunes. And with FrontRow you have the right interface. TV shows are MicroContent as well, so treat them as such. No need for a TV-tuner (nor a floppy)?

Categories/tags: MicroContent • type • video
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Tag police

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general • type
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Google Base MicroContent’ishness

And finally the Google Base service is really available. I like to focus on the MicroContent part of the service. Undoubtedly many other analyses will appear in the blogosphere.

The first question is whether I can call this service a MicroContent enabler at all. I think we can. The service does recognize MicroContent items as separate entities. This can be well seen on my published items page. The Google Items have structure, i.e. each item consists of multiple fields. The overview page gives an indication that there is a minimal set of fields. This minimal set consists of a title, labels (tags) and a description. Each items als has an author and a publication date. Each item does have a permalink, which links to the html-page of the item. Strangely enough this permalink is not always visible on the Items-page, but that can be tweaked. In conclusion Items on Google Base can be called MicroContent Items.

The next question is to analyse how far Google is on the MicroContent road. One thing I miss are the feeds or in fact any other method to export Items. I did not see any. The availability of the search function could result into all kinds of feeds. I hope they will add that at some other stage.

Google Base recognizes multiple MicroContent types: course shedules, events and activities, jobs, news and articles, etc. A user can even create his own Item types. And also existing Items are easily tweaked by adding or deleting fields. Thus the Items in Google Base are really wild.

An interesting function available within Google Base is the bulk upload. A user can point to either a tab-separated vale or XML-file. It supports RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 formats. Interestingly all the various fields are supported as well. They created various format additions to RSS. I have to experiment with this at a later stage. It would be nice when one could let Google Base subscribe to a feed. That would really put the data outside.

[Inspiration John Battelle]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • service • format • type
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Yahoo Shoposphere

A funny name, but yet another product bookmarking service. The Shoposphere itself is a search service where a user can search into the picklists created by users of Yahoo. A picklist is a list of products selected by a user. A user can add a comment to a product, but no tags. It is easy to copy (reblog) a product to your own list. The nice thing about this is the fact that it can be used for any product-url in the Yahoo comparison shopping service.

The user can create multiple lists (categories), such as the wish list, the owned list, etc. Any list can be published to other Yahoo users and thus turning it into a pick list (my example (stupid URL by the way)). Any picklist is also available as RSS-feed. Viewers of a picklist can add a comment to the list. And a picklist can be rated (yes/no) as well by other users.

I see Items on a Yahoo list as a bookmarks. The user can only supply a description per Item and the rest (product-url, date, author) is done by Yahoo. The various lists can be seen as categories, which limit the scope of the bookmarks on a list. The picklist itself seems to be a MicroContent Item as well. One can add comment and simple ratings to it.

[Inspiration Richard McManus]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • service • type • bookmark
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Amazon bookmark service

Various people around the blogosphere noted that Amazon introduced tags. I did not see it yet on Amazon.fr, so I headed over to Amazon.com. Near a product-item a user sees a field where he can enter a tag. This tag is however something personal and really is more like a bookmark. This means that the user can see which tags he used for which products. The user can thus create a list of Products, a bookmark list. For Amazon a bookmark just consists of this tag and the related Product. A user can also set whether the bookmark is private or not. There are no titles, no descriptions, no feeds, no permalinks.

[Inspiration Richard McManus]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • service • type • bookmark
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FireANT

Another client to view vlogs or videopodcast is FireANT. I am not impressed with the Mac-version. I can not set a video to fullscreen play for instance. Also the difference between an Item and a List is not very clear. Access to metadata however is good. The nicest thing is that this client is more an enclosure player. It support various mediatypes, such as MP3's, Quicktime, flash, etc.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • type • video
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VideoCast MicroContent client

I had a look at DTV, a client for managing videocasts. I think that a videocast is just another type of MicroContent. And that idea is well reflected in the layout of this application.

On the left side of the main screen one sees the Lists pane. This Lists pane contains Lists such as a Channel Guide, My Collection (the videocasts that I saved) and New Videos (I guess those are videocasts that are automatically downloaded, but not seen yet). And below that the Lists one is subscribed to. Here they are called Channels.

Clicking on a List will review the Items (videos) in the Items-pane. This is list in tabular format with a row for each videocast. Each row show the download status, a title, a short description, publication date, video format and size of the Item. For Items that have been downloaded one has the option of saving/deleting or mailing the Item. This is the Social Media Tool of a client, by the way.

When one presses play for a specific Item, the Items pane is replaced with a View pane, and can look at the video.

All in all a fairly standard MicroContent client, but with some specifics for Video.

[Inspiration BoingBoing]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • type • video
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Recommendation Services

It seems that the interest for Recommendation Services is growing and I even saw someone who made the connection with Web 2.0. Recommendations are however nothing new. Amazon has it for ages and remember Firefly. So I am not sure why there is renewed interest.

There is however a link with MicroContent, attention and personal profiles. Services like Firefly and Amazon demand that the user either uploads his CD catalog or rates a lot of CD suggestions. There are also services that allow a user to upload his iTunes playlist. I find all these services unsatisfying. It requires users to do an active search for music, listen to parts of tracks, rate again, etc. It is a lot of work.

That is why I like services like Pandora or Last.fm. Under the guise of a radio station the user can listen to music recommendations. If the user likes or dislikes a track, he can rate it. And if all goes well the recommendations get better. By the way I did not like the recommendations made by last.fm, so I gave up on them. And I subscribed to Pandora, which seems a lot better in giving recommendations.

But both services still have a MicroContent ownership problem. I would like to download a file with the tunes I listened to and how I rated them. That file is my attention and I would like to be able to reuse it. Even better I would like radio services (or any music recommendation service) to be able to use by music attention MicroContent (playlist?), which I have on my computer. And any service or client should be able to update that file, including iTunes, Amazon, Last.fm, Pandora, etc. Then I would not have to restart all over again with each new services. Let's have the Music Attention MicroContent outside.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • type • playlist
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Web 2.0 Customer

Nivi has an interesting breakdown of the various Web 2.0 customers/roles. I do not now what the relation is with Web 2.0, but I see a relation with MicroContent. And there is a relation with Attention.

• Creators - people who create original content. Basically this says that it is a starting point in a link web. This can be any kind of MicroContent;
• Linkers - These are authors who annotate items created by creators. This equals to the bookmarks MicroContent type. This MicroContent type should contain a link to the permalink of the Item of the creator. Ideally this permalink appears in a separate field in the structure of the Bookmark item;
• Commenters - this is any author that adds comments to an Item of a creator. This will imply a new MicroContent item with a permalink to the Item of the creator. In contrast to a bookmark, a commenter adds content, such as a tag, a review, a rating or just some comments to the original MicroContent item;
• Surfer - finally a surfer is someone who just consumes any MicroContent, the original thing created by the reator, a bookmark created by the linker or a review created by commenter. A surfer still creates some MicroContent, but it is implicitly hidden in his browser history log. It is his attention;

And note that any user can take any of the four roles.

[Inspiration Nova Spivack]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • type • web 2.0
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Folksonomy and MicroContent

Vander Wal complains about the current definition of folksonomy on Wikipedia. He sees more layers to folksonomy. he sees a relation between the viewer, the item and the tag itself.

I would place his comments in an emerging MicroWeb context and a relation to a personal profile / attention. The viewer is the person that reads and uses MicroContent items in various ways. This is the whole world of attention. Some MicroContent items are only viewed, some are bookmarked, some are tagged, some are commented upon in a weblog and some are copied in order to be kept. Attention has many levels.

The item basically the MicroContent Item with all its fields and structure, and the original author of that MicroContent Item. This author can also add tags/categories to his Item, which thus become part of the Item.

Thus we have two types of tags: viewer tags and item tags. One could see the viewer tags as bookmarks pointing to the item. An item will have viewer tag sphere around it, with all the tags tagged by viewers.

Similarly an author will have an attention tag sphere around himself. In this sphere are all the explicit tags he created, but also implicit tags of the MicroContent Items he viewed, but did not tag himself.

These tag spheres are the real MicroWeb of the future. And now extend it to other kind of fields as well, such as geotags, persons, etc.

And all these fields make a very interesting MicroWeb.

[Inspiration Martin Lindner]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • type , microcontent folksonomy tagging
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Review blog upgrade

I succeeded in transferring my Review-blog to my new CMS-system, Expression Engine. This also implies that the blog has a new url. This url will probably change in the future. In my old system I could create some structure, but it was limited to six fields. Now I have an unlimited number of fields. For my review blog I am using 12 fields and impromptu fields will end up in the tag-field.
 
But with the new system, I can put the format where my mouth is. So I intend to implement this blog in various other formats in the coming days. So it gives Marc Canter something to play with. But the web-page is already there, although I need to brush up my CSS.

Categories/tags: type • review , microcontent; type; review;
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