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19 Sep 2006
MicroContent divide
Martin Linder reports his visit to the Alt-C conference. He notices a divide between MicroContent users and non-users. Nothing new here. We already noticed this at the last Microlearning conference. The question is whether this is worrisome or not.
I do not think so. There always will be an avant-garde that is trying out new things. Some things will stick others will not. The things that will slowly be adopted by the main stream. I guess we see this now with blogs. Just see the stats from Technorati.
And then there is a difference between lurkers and contributors. Some only view MicroContent created by others. Nothing new here either. Just calculate how much blog items you see per day and many you create yourself. The same is true for podcasts, images, videos, etc.
The more MicroContent Types there will be, the larger the chance that there is just that MicroContent Type that you like to contribute yourself. Whether that is a blog item, a puzzle or a knitting pattern.
Naturally the threshold for creating MicroContent must be as low as possible. Creating images with digital cameras or a phone is a first step. Getting the images then onto the Internet is a next step. Moblogging makes this already easy, but it should be even easier. The same is true for videos and audio. The advantage of images and videos is that automatically a lot of metadata has been added (still waiting for the geographic locations). The user has to add only a little information by himself, such as the title. Any other MicroContent Type requires more effort from the user and thus makes the threshold higher. One should adapt to the activities that the user already knows. Thus adding RSS to a Mail application might be a good idea.