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09 Juin 2005
MicroContent definition thoughts
Stephan Mosel google’d around for definitions on MicroContent. He says that defining MicroContent is not very hard. I still have mixed feelings about the definitions (including mine). The definition still does not convey what MicroContent all can be. So I reverted to defining MicroContent by example. Also because I think a lot of people have a to narrow view of what MicroContent can be.
I am still looking for the attributes of MicroContent. At the moment I have the following list:
- small - read micro. This is still a troublesome attribute, as MicroContent items seems to grow and grow and can become pretty large. But it is good to focus on smallness. MicroContent can be small and that is worth to note in itself;
- self-contained - this attribute I like much better. It means that MicroContent can live on its own. It does not need to have context. I am not sure whether I exclude an MicroContent types by this, such as Discussion Forum Items. In a Discussion Forum has a strong thread between each Item in a discussion;
- addressable - I think that this one is important. This is Marc Canter’s demand. Each piece of MicroContent must have a unique permaUri. That allows for syndication in all kind of forms. This implies that MicroContent can be autonomous;
- structured - MicroContent should have structure. This can be extremely minimal (title, permaUri, description), but ideally more fields are defined;
- flexibility - MicroContent should not be rigid in it’s structure. The user should be able to add fields at will, or fallback to a minimal set. Flexibility also implies that there shouldn’t be any rigid schema’s underlying any MicroContent type. It should be like OPML, but with a good reference to a dictionary;
- single - this attribute I am not sure about. I believe that each MicroContent item should have it’s own file (or resource). There seems to be a trend to embed multiple MicroContent items in a single piece of MacroContent. If you see the number of different MicroContent items (and types) people add to their blog-page, it has become a petri-dish for all kinds of MicroContent. It will become harder and harder to extract the MicroContent item you want. I am afraid this will hamper the creation of the MicroWeb;
- computer data - I reference this in my definition, so I should include it here as well: we talk about computer readable data;
This list seems to imply that I need to update my definition.
Notice that I evaded the data/metadata dilemma. What is data for one is metadata for another and vice-versa. I get the impression that there is a grey zone between the two. I rather use the word metadata in the way that I learned it: it defines the fields and format of a MicroContent type.