Poor man’s MicroContent

Yiibu claims to have re-invented MicroContent. That is quite an over statement. What they did was create a set of images with information on tropical fish. A user can look through this stack of images and find the information they want. The idea of a stack of images is especially geared towards small screen devices. I find this not very interesting, all structure is missing. It still shows that we have a long way to go if we must use this idea to get interesting MicroContent on small devices.

[Inspiration B. Mann]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general • type
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Hello,

Thanks for taking the time to look at what we’re doing. To clarify, I think it was Boris who claimed we were revolutionizing microcontent (thanks Boris,) and believe me we’d love to, but as we all know it’s not that simple and others have been working on it far longer than we have. But we’d like to approach the problem a bit differently and start from the content angle, rather than the structure angle.

Yes...structure is missing in our stacks because of the output format. It’s very missing. And sure, we could have added lots of structure using a different format but we’re purposely trying to experiment with content under a fairly strict set of guidelines a) open content (not only openly licensed but as open as possible from a technology (runtime, codecs, formats and platforms) point of view.) So Flash/FlashLite would have been great but to most users a SWF is pretty hard to do anything with after the fact. b) content that’s easy to create or modify and quick to deploy/redeploy for average users. So that eliminates Java. And c) highly visual layouts. We’re not talking reviews, recipes or text-based blog posts (nothing wrong with those but that’s not our focus.) So the base common denominator for now is JPG stacks ‘a la’ Hypercard and of course xhtml/css/Javascript for browsers that support it – which isn’t yet an option in the mobile space.

The next step is to assign structure while keeping the content open. There’s lots of possibilities long-term, Opera/ OpenLaszlo/Dashboard’esque widgets (mobile and web-based – xhtml/xml//css/javascript) and miscellaneous formats like XUL/XAML (too one sided). It’s a bit of a waiting game but in the meantime we’re getting lots of feedback and as simple (i.e. primitive) as JPG stacks may sound, once you get them onto a device and start passing them around, we’re finding that people like them. And the ability to take the content and remix it has caused all sorts of people to suggest ways to reuse them.

So with the fish, more than a few people have found themselves breaking into fish stories (diving, food etc.) Now imagine a structured micro-content publishing system where users could manage, remix and republish content to tell their own stories – not only on the desktop web but also on their devices. Add some feeds, tags, permanent URI structure and decent metadata (to keep license information intact and provide context – but not DRM) and we have a continuation of what’s already happening in the blogosphere and on sites like Flickr but with richer media offerings and re-use built in.

The jpg stacks are simply a starting point for us - focused on content rather than structure. Once we know what we really want to build we can start adding more structure throughout the process, but we feel that by starting with too much structure at the beginning there is a good chance of ending up with something resembling SMIL, XSLT or some other arguably over engineered solution looking for a problem.

Great post as it does suggest that we definately need to talk more about where we’re heading, rather than just the here and now.

Sincerely,

Bryan and Stephanie
Yiibu

Thanks for the great and very long comment on my harsh(-ish) post. I appreciate what you are doing on small devices and I agree that content should come first. I am just a dissapointed that these devices take such a long time to catch up. I noticed some structure in the XMP-part of the images by the way. I guess that is the way to go at the moment, lacking better support on such devices.

Your comment made me think about images in another way. It reminds me a bit about cartoons, which are also distributed as images.

Arnaud,

I began looking at creating content for the mobile space a couple of years back, and after spending far too much time immersed in J2ME, C++, various APIs and specifications I wrote the following post:

http://bryanrieger.com/2005/02/01/mobile-content-formats/

Macromedia is still pushing FlashLite, but personally I’d rather have a standard that everybody can build on and play with (the SWF format is open, but the Flash Player itself is proprietary). Hopefully with Nokia (Webkit and Mozilla’s Minimo) and Opera’s recent renewed interest in xhtml + css + javascript we’ll start to see some web standards adoption in the mobile space before too long.

BTW - XMP metadata gets ripped out by MANY image viewers when pictures are rotated, scaled, or manipulated in any way and the re-saved. You’d think after all these years we could ensure metadata could actually be embedded in the majority of file formats and actually be respected by the majority of applications… :(

Sincerely,

Bryan

Thanks a lot. You gave a nice overview of the state of the clients on small devices. It seems there is still some work to do in that area. Pity I can not really test your stacks. I just had a look at it in iPhoto (I created an album for it). The stacks themselves are very nice, just a pity you had to revert to images.

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