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22 Aou 2004
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:
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.
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:
Open content describes any kind of creative work including articles, pictures, audio, and video that is published in a format that explicitly allows the copying of the information.
Which basically says that content equals creative work. Isn’t that too restrictive?
The definitions from Google do help us more. I find there:
Content means all forms of information, and without limitation includes: text, formatted text such as HTML pages, interactive and/or dynamic Web pages (such as those generated from data files and databases), images, animation, video and sound files. It may also include software, Web-based output from software applications and Web-based input (ie. transactions).
I like this one best, as it covers any information.
Content is any information that can be represented in computer data format.
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.
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