Characteristics

Now that we got the (vague) definition out of the way, we need to specify more. Marc Canter often defines microcontent by some examples. I do not find this enough. I think there must be more in common. I see microcontent as a family with some common characteristics. In this post I want to discuss those common characteristics.

First of all there is the common definition.

Microcontent is structured content. It is like a record in a database. Microcontent has one or more fields and each field has well defined semantics. A record in a database is not really a good comparison as structure might become very complex. Only think of a list of ingredients in an OpenRecipe. Each ingredient is already a record in the database sense.

Each member of the microcontent family has the same common fields. I am not sure what these fields must be, but i am thinking of the author_name, creation date, title, summary, author_address, foaf_address, etc. These fields all relate to general characteristics of the content. (Does the Dublin Core help here?)

Another important aspect of microcontent is its openness. Microcontent is open to be used by other people and this requirement has several consequences. This aspect is Marc Canter’s subscribable to.

Microcontent is content that is published. And this publish events requires several fields, which are common to members of the family.

As Marc Canter already stated, every piece of microcontent must have a unique URL, the permalink. This allows others to syndicate the microcontent. Note that this will exclude a lot of content. For instance if I add a blogroll to weblog, but do not offer it also as a separate URL, it is not Microcontent. Although it could be.

Other fields can probably be found in the RSS-standard or in the Dublin Core. One can think of publication date, expiration date, etc.

And there must be technical requirements that are common to all members. I guess XML is a good one for markup. And there might be requirements about the publication method (HTML, RSS, Atom, Email, etc.)

Categories/tags: definition
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Definition of Microcontent

Flemming Funch discusses the definition of Microcontent and Marc Canter has added his ideas to that. If this subject wants to get any further a clear definition is needed that is supported by most people. Although using the word Microcontent a lot will also help. Otherwise people will start using new words, such as digital artifacts (Jon Udell). As Funch already points out the history of the word has no meaning anymore.

The definition of Anil Dash comes already a lot closer:

I think this definition adds a lot of unnecessary burden to the definition. I think that presentation should not be part of such a definition. Microcontent should be independent of presentation limitations, presentation is up to the client. The idea that Microcontent has a unique identifier, such as an URL is important.

The idea that microcontent should convey one primary idea or concept sound interesting. Does this contrasts itself from content proper? The Wikipedia-entry for content does not help much. It gives the synonym Creations. A comment by Richard Stallman notes that there are three types of content, which does not help us a lot. Relevant to this is the Wikipedia-entry for Open Content:

Which basically says that content equals creative work. Isn’t that too restrictive?

The definitions from Google do help us more. I find there:

I like this one best, as it covers any information.

Now we have give a meaning to the adjective micro in the context of content. Google does not find a definition, so we have to do with the definition of micro: extremely small. We are thus left with extremly small (piece of) information in computer data format as a working definition.

This definition only starts to live with examples of microcontent, such as a blog-entry, a review, an image (think Flickr), a bookmark (think Del.ico.us), etc. These microcontent examples only get a purpose / meaning in another context. An image is part of a photo-book or a ‘rate-this’-service. A book-mark only has value in your personal bookmark-list or in a category of an aggregator, such a Del.ico.us. A review is related to the book or CD and gets more meaning in the list of reviews at Amazon. I think that this lack of context for microcontent might be a good distinguisher from content, although I doubt that it is enough. The idea that microcontent is small as in the number of bytes has not much relevance.

Categories/tags: definition
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RSSCalender

Marc Canter comments on the RSS-feed of RSS-calendar. I fully agree with him. This is shit. This is just a weblog with a description of events and the description includes date, place, start- and endtime. This is a very lame attempt to create an event-RSS standard. I want at least the date, location, start and end time in separate XML-tags. And probably more. I did not yet think about it, but there is undoubtedly more standardised already.

And there is a difference between an event and a calendar. A calendar is an aggregation of events. And I might like to subscribe to a single event and not the whole calendar.

Categories/tags: event
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Digital Lifestyle Aggregation

Marc Canter referred in one of his posts to a post on Jason Kottke weblog, who quoted Harold. I found some interesting things in this blog entries. Let me start with Harold’s quote:

I’m beginning to think that feeds (and content tagging) should be the starting point, not an offshoot. Until now, our tools have produced web pages then feeds. I’m thinking we need tools that create feeds and then let us combine them into web pages.

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I fully agree. I am starting to create all my websites as weblogs in some form or another with pMachine. Basically this implies that each webpage consists of multple entries (a weblog), which can be ordered in some way or another. This does not always have to a time-ordering as is usual in a standard weblog. I can chose another ordering as well. I decide however the order. These entries can be published as a feed, which I do create for most pages/logs. These feeds allow others to take my content and incorporate it in other webpages. Some of the feeds are static, i.e. content does not change, and other feeds change constantly as I add new content. These feeds are not really the source of my websites, but they could be theoretically. The pMachine system however allows me to mix multiple logs stored in a MySQL database and create a webpage from it. But whether this content is stored in a SQL-database or a RSS-feed does not really matter.

Jason Kottke adds to this that also other content, which you create with other sources should be mixed into your website. I agree. I would however like to make a distinction between content you create yourself and content created by others. Content created by others should be integrated into your website through a feed. For content created by yourself you should try to keep it in your own hand. pMachine gives the idea that any content could be published through that system. Each micro-content type could lead to its own feed with its own format, which is where the standardisation effort comes in. The content you produce should however be published with the same system, otherwise you are not able to manage it. The distributed storage solution suggested by Leo Kottke seems a bit to complex. However with good feed standardisation it could be possible.

Marc adds to that, that one is working on many components in order to achieve this goal. I get the impression that the emphasis lies on aggregator services. Keep all the content you create with a single reliable provider and publish your (micro-)content as a feed. If you want to be a part of a social network aggregator service, just hook up your micro-content feed to the service, but never give away your content. We need an environment where the creation of such hook-ups is easy.

Categories/tags: general
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Marc’s Roadshow

Marc is coming over to Paris and organises a dinner of microcontent, etc. He asks people to come. I’d love to go there. The meeting seems to be however a bit small versus the expenses I have to make. It is a pity. I would love to meet these people (and get the T-shirt).

Categories/tags: general
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New weblog

I introduced a new category on this weblog: Micro content. I am starting to get interesting in this subject and started to gather news and links around it. Micro Content is for me anything published by a person, which is a small piece of content. Usually this person is a consumer, an end-user, who gets in on the action of publishing content. The content can be anything: a weblog, a book review, a bookmark, a review (of a book, sundial, product, etc.), his music, a music list, etc. There is no limit to this content listing. The content is typically very small in terms of number of bytes.

Usually this content is free to be used by other services, when they consent to the rules of the publisher. A Creative Commons license might be used here.

The content might be published using a syndication format. such as RSS. This makes it easy for other services to create for instance networked services. The RSS feed can be adapted to a OpenContent XML format, so that the various fields get more meaning and the networking gets more interesting.

I will try to extend this rough description in the future as I add content to this category. If the category grows out of control I will move it to a separate weblog in the future. We’ll see what happens.

Update: I decided to create the new weblog and I moved this entry to that weblog.

Categories/tags: general
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OpenAnything

In the theme of Open your information, I found this log entry. Jeff Jarvis wants all of his information to reside online. This will allow it to be accessible from his clients machines and possibly for his friends.

I like the idea.

Categories/tags: general
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