All I know that it is not available on MacOSX. It was available on NeXTSTEP, but got lost in the transition. It was mashing avant le lettre in some sense.

The idea is great, but it is not yet robust enough. I was only able to get an workflow run twice. And some other activities are in the pipeline (I hope). The Dropipe application ended with an error message. It can be that the service is now overloaded due to its exposure on ReadWrite web. So I will come back to it later.

The documentation still needs a lot of work. It is totally unclear what some services do.

Bento is called a personal database system and can (and should) not be compared to a full fledged relational database application. And this is also the challenge for the developers: what functionality can be added without becoming to complex. I have the feeling that quite a lot can still be added without becoming to advanced. It should have not become more complex than one of Apple’s iApps.

In my first testcase I created a flat database, such as a collectioneur might use. In my case the collection consists op bottle caps. I have a version of this database online at Listphile. As you can see there, a record consists of a title, a description, an image, links, etc.

1. Tags - Bento does not know tags as a concept. It is possible to add tags, but then I lack facilities that I am used to, as in Sandvox or WebnoteHappy for instance. It is possible to use tags through a "related records list", but that is not as nice;
2. Links - Bento supports links, but in a limited fashion. Their approach is taken from Apple’s AddressBook. This implies that the title corresponding to an URL, is extreme limited. Out of the box the title can be ‘home’, ‘work’ or ‘other’. One can add other titles, but this is in no way a generic link approach;
3. Edit/Design - Bento allows the user to edit his data and change the presentation at the same time. It is very good that this is possible, but I noticed that I accidentally get in design-mode when I want to edit and vice-versa. I would like to see a locking system. This should allow me to lock-down a design when I am finished with it;
4. Limited design - Bento does not allow the user to change the design to much. I guess that this way to go is OK for this application, but as it is now it is not enough. Bento should take an approach similar to the iLife suite and introduce an Inspector. This Inspector could have multiple modes, which are now hidden under the menu of Bento;
   1. Field - allows to set and change field type and its attributes. Change the field name;
   2. Label - The label text defaults to the field name. However the user can also use another text without changing the field name. The appearance of the label (font, font size, color). The position of the label (above/below/left/right/none);
   3. Field content - This should allow to change the appearance of a field. This is a bit similar to the Form Tools, but more flexible: choice of font, font size, color of font, color of field box, etc;
   4. Page appearance - the Themes that Bento supports is extremely limited. Just look at the Keynote application for a better approach;
   5. Related List appearance - I would like to be apple to suppress the column and row header. And I certainly would like to suppress the controls at the bottom. And if I have just one 1 item in the list, I would like to see a presentation similar to the other fields;
   6. Object appearance - Now I can not change anything and yet there are many attributes that could be changeable;
5. Tabular layout - Bento forces to use tabular layout for elements (fields, related lists, objects) on a form. I guess this is OK in order to limit the complexity. I would like to see some more flexibility, where for instance a column divider does not span the whole page, but just a limited number of rows;
6. Objects - The number of objects is now a bit limited. I would like to see images for instance (my company logo!). And naturally the Inspector should allow to edit the attributes of the objects. Take the Keynote app as inspiration here;
7. Publishing - any modern data based application should allow to integrate with Internet. There are many possible ways to do this. At its basic Bento should allow to export records into HTML-files. At the next level integration with MobileMe could be possible. Take inspiration from MacGourmet here;
8. Spotlight - integration with Spotlight would be nice. Individual records should turn up in the Spotlight results;
9. Media browser - a media browser such as can be found in the iLife suite is nice. This would make adding media to records more easier. Just integrate the iMedia browser from Karelia;
10. Button bar I would like to see a standard MacOSX button bar. This would allow me to set the buttons that I need most and suppress the others. For me this is: Add record, change view (table/split/form), set form, next/previous record, show media browser;

It might seem that I have a lot on comments on Bento (and that I am not happy with it). The contrary is true. It just inspires me and I see many growth directions. The list here are just some ideas that I would use right away. It can become more complete without being much more complex. It does not have to be as simple as iTunes, but can be complex as Keynote. Anyway, I put my money where my mouth is and acquired the application.

Bento allows the user to create any MicroContent Type he likes. In Bento each MicroContent Type is called a library. The user can create as much types as he wants. Each Library consists of one or multiple fields. One can select from field types text, number, choice, textbox, media, time, date, duration, counting, rating, address, phone number, email address and URL. This shows the database origin of Bento. As nothing is preset, one can add any field, one can say that Bento supports Wild MicroContent.

The nice thing of Bento is that it can link to other MicroContent Types. These links are called Lists. Out of the box Bento recognizes File Lists, Message Lists, Address Lists, Event Lists and Task Lists. These Lists are by the way linked to the Finder, Mail, AddressBook and iCal applications. These fields are truly Lists as they can be linked to multiple Items.

Also nice is that one can export definitions of MicroContent Types, called Library Templates. So sharing of MicroContent definitions is thus easy for Bento users.

The main Bento screen is very straightforward and reminiscent of other MicroContent Clients. On the left one has the Libraries pane. Each MicroContent Type is indicated by booklike icon. The libraries such as Address Book, iCal Events and iCal Tasks are preset. For each Library it is possible to create handpicked and smart lists. Thus the small icon labelled ‘beer’ indicates a smart list from Capsules.

Below the libraries pane one can see a field pane. This pane allows to add and remove fields. The visibility of this field pane can be suppressed. Also the visibility of the entire library/field pane can be suppressed.

The top right pane is the standard Items pane in table format. One can drag columns around, set the sorting on a column. The nice thing of this implementation is that it works like a spreadsheet. And one can suppress the visibility of this pane.

This brings us to the view-pane. As expected this shows an individual Item. Each field is presented with its label. Note the Bookmarks and Tags Lists, which are presented as Item-panelets. Everything in Bento is editable. There is no separate edit-mode. Thus any field can be changed as needed. Some fields come with preset buttons, for external linking, etc. Below the view-pane one can see controls to add/delete/import/export/print Items.

Above the view-pane buttons allow to change forms or to change to items-pane. The layout of the view-pane is known as a form. And the user can define as many forms as he like. And this is another important feature of Bento. The user can design the view-pane form. Thus he can set which fields should appear on a form, where they should appear, etc. There is no separate design-mode either, anything can be changed, resized, etc. at will.

Naturally Bento can still be improved. I would like to seem integration with other applications, such as iPhoto, iTunes and iMovie. I would like to see some standard libraries for MicroContent Types such as bookmarks, blogs, recipes, etc. I would like to see support for tags as a field type.

Instead of the table format for the Items pane, I would like to see support other formats, such as a grid format for images. I have mixed feelings on the instant editability and designability. I would like to see some locking mechanisms to prevent errors.

The import and export facilities are reminiscent of a true database: csv and tab-delimited files. I miss XML support, such as RSS and OPML and a Internet publishing facility.

All in all a very good application for those who like to keep lists or have the need for a simple database. I guess I will be buy it.

So what does blip.fm add. Basically it just allows to add a microblog comment to each song that is played. I already record some of these things on various microblogs, so this does not add much.

So what is left, is the social component, the DJ. I wonder whether this adds something over last.fm. So I can’t be enthusiastic at the moment about this service.

The Photo Browser Window shows the images that can be found in the iPhoto-database. The window is limited to a Lists-pane (at the top) and an Items-pane (at the bottom). The size of the window can be changed to view more or les images in the Items-pane.

The Lists-pane shows all Lists, handpicked and smart, Events, etc that are also found and defined in iPhoto (no Albums though). The Events-list even changes the content of the Items-pane to mimic iPhoto’s behaviour. Thus moving the mouse over an events image will present the images pertaining to that event.

And finally there is a search facility (title, description, keywords and rating) for quickly finding images. The window also supports videos, but these have to be in the iPhoto supported format.

The only thing that I miss is access to the Pictures folder and the image scaling.

The Items-pane shows the bookmarks of a selected list in table format. The user can determine which fields must be shown. In addition to the bookmark fields, the user can also show the visit date, the visit count, the added date or the last visited date.

The most interesting part is the Lists-pane, as this is not totally compatible with other MicroContent Clients. The History-list is a folder with the recent browsing behaviour, so not really a bookmark thing. The Tags-List is really a group that contains preprogrammed smart folders for each tag. Each tag-folder contains the bookmarks that have been tagged as such. The All Bookmarks group is really the entire library of bookmarks. This group contains three other lists/groups: the Bookmarks Toolbar group, the Bookmarks Menu group and the Unsorted Bookmarks group. These three groups are fixed and one can not add other groups on this level.

When adding a bookmark one can chose on of these groups or any folder in these groups. One can also drag&drop bookmarks from one group to another. The Bookmarks Menu group has two predefined Smart Lists: Recently Bookmarked and Recent Tags. I assume that ‘recent’ means the last 10. These Lists can be d&d’d to other groups.

The Bookmarks Toolbar group has smart lists for Most Visited and Latest Headlines. It is again unclear what Most Visited means. Latest Headlines refer to Items in a RSS-feed. This seems to be part of the Live Bookmarks feature of Firefox.

All in all a pretty reasonable implementation of a MicroContent Client, but it is not match for WebNoteHappy. The tag-feature is nice, but the approach will break down with hundred of tags. I miss XBEL-support. And I can not create my own smart lists. And it is just to slow for many bookmarks.

On the other hand the integration with the browsers allows to create smart folders such as ‘most visited’. I do not like the split between Toolbar, Menu and the rest. In this way there is no entire library. I understand why it was done in this way, it seems simpler. The integration of the URI-bar with the bookmarks library is very nice. This allows to make very clever URL-suggestions and can indicate whether the URL has been bookmarked yet.

The user can create multiple ‘newspaper pages’, add feeds and assign a feed to a pane. The location of the panes and the format for each pane is set and can not be changed.

At this stage of the application I have mixed feelings. I appreciate the possibility to see multiple headline in one glance, so I can quickly scan news. Depending on how interesting a feed is I can increase of decrease the amount I see. So it should be much quicker scanning and reading. If there is something interesting I can drag it to a shelf for later reading.

I however miss some control. How can I see whether I read an article or not? Why can I not edit my RSS-URLS? My RSS-feed did not show anything, I was not able to figure out what went wrong. The import feeds from NetNewsWire is nice, but with hundreds of feeds imported shows that tthe current feed management solution is not the right one.

However the application shows an interesting new visual apporach to MicroContent. And one that I do not yet have fully my head around.

And take your data out, do not trust services, replicate your data as much as possible, do it yourself.

Web Apps do not yet have the required trust in order to become mainstream. You only trust what you have in your hands, on your computer. A good point. There is a lack of transparency. With a browser based web app, you know your data is in the cloud. With a desktop based web app it is much unclearer where your data is stored. There is no need to know, location is transparent.

One of the reason mentioned is that Web Apps are not ubiquitous yet. We do not have access everywhere yet. a very good argument. I loven reading blog-posts, listening to music, looking at vidcasts, creating blog-posts, when I am forced to be offline.

I agree with the comment that ‘the browser is no place for multitasking’. Josh Catone wants to replace it with multiple browser applications, each application for a single web app, as is the intention with Mozilla Prism. As indicated in the post: ‘a browser is not for hosting applications’. Adobe AIR is already a much better approach, but it is not good enough. Real desktop apps are just much better. Just have a look at MarsEdit, WebNoteHappy, etc. Unfortunately there are now also bad MacOSX examples, such as net4mac, which is just a dedicated browser. Real Desktop Web Apps are based on API’s and not on parroting the corresponding web-pages.

For me it is all about the integrated experience between all the applications.

The service works around music. The application allows you start and stop music from the iTunes library. If the track is recognised the app shows recommended tracks. When the application starts it upload the iTunes library. I guess this is for the recommendations, however these only come after one has played something.

On the site a list of recently played tracks are shown. Also a list of recommended artists and tracks are shown. strangely it asks me whether I know artists that are already in my iTunes library. It should have known that. You can indicate whether you know tracks and artists.

As an aggregating service you can also view top tracks, artists, etc. And there are the standard community features. And finally there are Parties, which I have not chequed out.

Drawbacks are that I can not listen to recommended music, just teasers. And why RealMedia?

I am afraid that I stick with Last.fm, I do not see any advantages and see more drawbacks.

Now back to my map. My map shows the relation between the Information Viewpoint (the MicroContent Types/Objects) and the Computational Viewpoint (Applications/Services). The Enterprise Viewpoint is not relevant here, as the intentions and goals of the user are unknown. The Computational Viewpoint covers the actions a user wants perform on the MicroContent Objects (create, read, get, publish, etc.).

In these two viewpoints we should not talk about protocols, API’s, systems, software, distribution of components, etc. In several of the PLE diagrams, I see all the Viewpoints mixed, resulting (at least for me) in an unclearer picture. Unfortunately this is also often reallife reality, users a confronted with all kinds of technological and engineering aspects and they shouldn’t be. Things should be more transparant.

I must say that I find the drawings a bit hard to grasp. What I take out of these drawings is that many components (systems, services, software, etc.) are involved, many type of contents (user generated, professional), content is distrbuted over multiple places, API’s, etc.

For me the problem with such diagrams is that they try to describe the world in a single image, on multiple abstraction levels. These diagrams are nice show the complexity, but I miss some internal logic. And that logic is what I am always looking for.

These (personal) MicroContent Maps are an attempt to attain some logic. Let me explain these levels:

1. Me - at the top-level is the user that consumes (toMe) or publishes content. The user also needs other functions to manage his content;
2. MicroContent Type - on the second level are the MicroContent Types, the various forms of MicroContent. One could add other file formats (documents, spreadsheets, presentations), etc, to this level, but I chose to limit myself to MicroContent;
3. MicroContent Applications - on the third level are the applications that are used to consume/publish individual MicroContent Items. I limited myself here to applications. One could add here services that one uses through a browser;
4. MicroContent Services - and on the third level one has the MicroContent Services that communicate with MicroContent Clients through either API’s or feeds (Atom/RSS);

Naturally there are things missing from these maps. They are limited to what I actually use for instance. I would like to add the distinction between API, RSS-based and embedded MicroContent for instance. I think I should add Browser-based services, such as Gliffy in some way.

My toMe map:

The toMe-map describes the clients I use to get MicroContent Items from the Internet. This can be through a feed, embedded in a web-page / HTML-fragment or as free Items with corresponding permalinks. Some clients are closely related to a corresponding web-service.

The other clients are basically generic ones and not tied to a specific service. I guess the message is here that I do not like to be locked in into any service.

The fromMe map looks a bit different:

What it basically says, is that I use a private solution for publishing. Only for images and video I started using public services in order to lower the burden of my file storage. And I have no practical experience with events and audio publishing.

This idea of uncovering threads has also been tried with blog-posts. With breaking comment-systems another solutions are required. One solution could be that instead of putting a comment in the comments part of a blog, one puts the comments in one’s own blog with a reference to the blog-item one comments to. So just add the link. There was a party that did this (don’t remember who). Problem is that there should be an unambiguous way to encode these referral permalinks.

Quotable tries to do something similar. There solution is a bit more easier, as they only have to worry about Twitter. I am not sure how one create good threads. By adding ‘@username’ one refers to another Twitter-user, which is a good begin. However it seems that one can not refer to a specific post of that user. It seems that one can only refer to the latest post. When I add the tinyURL of the post, it does not help.

So for the moment Quotably is a limited solution.

I am a bit reluctant in creating systems. There are already so many things around. But then I am not familiar enough with KnowledgePulse.

The concept of ‘Continuous Partial Attention’ is interesting. With all the information flowing towards our devices (thanks to RSS), we live in an information sea that is very close to us. The question is whether we will pay attention to that sea. If I look at Twitter or Jaiku, then there is a peripheral component. But there are also other examples reminding of radio.

On my platform I created such a sea. Thanks to Growl a small windowlet pops up in the right-top corner of my screen, with the latest tweet. This windowlet stays there for 1 second and dissolves into the background. I have a choice to look at it and read the message, or just let it pass. Information in this windowlet can come from a variety of sources, such as Twitter, Jaiku, last.fm and all kinds of other status messages from local applications. Think also of instant messaging clients, where you notice your friends login and -out. This kind of information flow is like being ‘next to the sea’.

Fortunately there is no attention grabbing. When I do not look at this local sea, then it will be lost, but nothing will be lost.

This is a bit different from beeps from the mail application to indicate that there is new mail, or indicators to show how much new mail, rss-item, etc you have waiting for you.

The idea of an application taking over when there is no foreground activity (afk), reminds me of a screensaver. This screensaver would then sequentially present new Items from the subscribed RSS feeds.

The Growl-messages could be ‘calls for attention’. It however depends how intrusive these calls are. At the moment it is relatively hard for me to react to these calls: I can not click on them, I have to see the associated application and put that application to the front.

As soon as you are going to react to impulses from the sea, you are going in. You are opeining your Twitter client, RSS-client, etc, and are going to read the information for real.

In the MicroPulse description also more intrusive examples of Micropulses are mentioned. I have to ‘click-away’ these pulses, the come back until I did something with it. It reminds me of annoying pop-up, pop-under windows, of bouncing dock-items, etc. All requiring me to change my focus from my current task to something else. I do not want to be overwhelmed by waves from the sea.

The micro-information loop tries to establish the relation between this sea and the user. This relation is determined by the interaction the user has with that information, i.e. the amount of attention the user awards to that information. As described, there can be many levels of (’moe’ tweets whether I like to play Mario Kart with him on the DS) attention.

A question is, whether this attention recording process must be something explicit, as described with the Flash cards.

The idea of a context dependent sea/radio is an interesting one. It might lower the information overload burden, it is no longer necessary to switch contexts. But then these tweets ‘out of context’ are also nice and offer the coffe machine environment.

I have mixed feelings on the recorder thing. I am all in favor, in fact I tried to set up something for my self with, blogs, bookmarks, etc. In reality I do not seem to benefit from it. I guess that this is just the state of art. Recommendation is still extremely lousy. But here seems to main challenge.

For the moment no comments on the system part, it all depends what you want to accomplish.

In TimeLine one can either import MicroContent Items or create one’s own. A TimeLine Item consists of a title, a date (or a date range), notes (optional), an image (optional) and a link (optional).

On creating a new TimeLine it is possible to import Items from the AddressBook (birthdays), iCal (a selected calendar), iPhoto (creation dates), iTunes (recently playes songs/albums), RSS/Atom feeds, System Profiler (recent Apple updates), Skitch and NetNewsWire (publish dates). And when Images are available they are shown on the timeline.

The timeline is one of the presentation modes for MicroContent. The other are the table, the grid and location.

All in all very interestying. Unfortunately I did not have a need yet for such visualisation. The application si a bit rough at times. I had a few stalls that required me to force quit the app. I would like to see the possibility to import events at a later stage and on the secondary timeline. And I guess there other Items that could be imported as well, a Framework to do this would be in place, although the generic RSS/Atom helps a lot. And I woulk like to see a zoom possibility, so that I can see the entire timeline in a single screen.

MoodBlast also has some support for creating the message as well. Thus one can add information on music that is playing in iTunes, the weather, the latest favorite video on YouTube. It also supports some specifics of individual services, such as the location in Jaiku, video-links in Tumblr.

The app can also grab url’s from browsers and add them to a message. And this also results in a structured post in Pownce, very neat.

All in all this can very well be my main application. I only miss the possibility to upload to my own micro-blog. This is however solved with the introduction of applescript support. So now I can use MoodBlast in conjunction with Quicksilver.

At first it just looks like another micro-blog. The structure of an Item consist of just one field: the title. And I use Pownce in this way, as I post to 4 micro-blog services simultaneously. An Item (called a note) has a corresponding permalink, where one can also see the comment thread.

However Pownce is not limited to a micro-blog structure, it is possible to add more fields to a pst/item. The ‘link’ structure adds a field for a URL.

The ‘file’ structure allows you to add any file. If I add an image it will be shown in the note. A file can only be posted to friends.

And finally one can create an event. This structure consists of a title, a place, date/time and a real note. There is a corresponding ics-file for easy importing. Interestingly you can reply to such a post to indicate you will attend.

I get the impression that I can not edit a note. I already needed that feature a few times. I am also annoyed that I can not edit the recipients. I already made several errors due to that. I miss a RSS-feed, at least I do not see it.

Pownce is a bit more a communication service, as one can send a note to just a single friend, all friends or the public. I like the approach of Pownce to struture.: if you want more, just add a field. It is much more like wild MicroContent.

I do not think that I will use Pownce though. I only view MicroContent through feeds in NetNewsWire. Although I will continue publishing to Pownce. My usage will depend on the feeds and integration with my desktop;

When a user subscribes he can indicate the services that must be combined. The service supports twitter, amazon wishlist, delicious, last.fm, stumbleupon, flickr, etc (28 services at the moment). The service makes it very easy to add an rss-feed, you just have to specify your username. As they do not check the password of the corresponding service, you can just mix and match whatever you want. And in addition one can just add any other rss-feed, by typing the corresponding URL.

This makes it just a personal rss-aggregator just like Yahoo Pipes. Only the functionality is more limited, but much easier to use.

What the service makes interesting is that you can also find aggregated feeds of other users. And you can make imaginary friends for feeds of those that did not subscribe yet to friendfeed. I like this feature as you not have to do the aggregation of your friendfeed’s yourself. And this is an easy place to find them. Often I am not able to find all the feeds of someone as they are not readily published somewhere.

Naturally the problem is that you are already subscribed to a lot of information of your friends, so this only will double your information overload.

By the way, friendfeed republishes everything again as feeds, so you do not have to go to the site again.

Now I have to wait until all my friends subscribe, so I can aggregate their stuff. ANd in the mean time I create new subscriptions and new feeds for new services.

First of all we have to look where we can find the MicroContent in auctions. The MicroContent Item is the auction itself, with the auction ID, current price, auction closing time, Item title, seller-namer and seller-location. And there are probably some other fields as well. Each auction has a permalink at eBay, such as this one. I wonder how long these permalinks stay around.

The information on the auctioned Item is a MicroContent type in itself. I get the impression that eBay does not offer to much structure for this, but I have look a bit more into that, when I use a sell client, such as GarageSale or iSale. These two MicroContent Types (auction and auction-Item) are a bit merged. I am not sure whether this a good or bad thing and whether we have in fact two different MicroContent types. In contrast to normal shops, where the Item refers to a product-category, in the case of an auction one points to a single product, with all its defects.

Interestingly an auction MicroContent Item, is dynamic as buyings can place bis on Items and thus influencing one of the fields on that Item. In fact each bid can be seen as a MicroContent Item itself. The clients I looked at have no support for following bids and one has to refer to the corresponding web-page.

JBidWatcher presents a single window with a single pane. This pane (Items-pane) contains a list of all auctions that are followed in table format. The table contains fields such as auction number, auction title, seller-name, etc. It is not possible to add or remove fields.

GarageBuy is a bit more complex with a three pane setup. This reminds a lot of a standard MicroContent Client. There is View-pane with information on the auctioned Item (details-view). This contains either a description of the Item or the corresponding web-page at eBay. The Items-pane shows either a set of auctions or the details of a single auction. And finally there is a Lists-pane showing categories of auctions based on searches. Or auctions that are followed. One can sort these auctions into folders.

Unfortunately the mixing of searches and individual auctions breaks the logic a bit. I would have preferred to have a fourth pane for all the details.

What happens when we can combine these 'qiks' in a television channel? So you can subscribe to what you friends are looking at (and are saying).

And when talking about channels, what happened to audio. Are we missing a step here? Where are the audio channels? Where is my ambient channel from by combined friends?

Theory - I do not see anything happening on the theoretical front of MicroContent. But maybe I am looking at the wrong angle here. I guess that the Semantic Web can (and is) contributing here a lot, but I do not feel that impact.

Type Ranges - I am a proponent of many MicroContent Types. There are already many types available, but there does not seem to much growth. The main types are still the golden triad (audio, image, video). Naturally blogs and micro-blogs are still continuing to get attention, and are still growing.

Other types just have a lot less impact. Where are the other types? Where are the downloadable recipes? I assume that the acceptance of other MicroContent Types depends on the availability of standards and support in services and applications. That is where the portable identity is stalling now (and getting new traction). And Locations (as in KML) are now getting traction. What is happening with bookmarks?

Mashing - The number of mash-ups are still increasing. Have to look a bit more into this. Many mash-ups are based on Google Maps. These are not really MicroContent related mash-ups, but more general Web 2.0 approaches. Many mash-ups are limited to widgets, i.e. filling a web-page. That is all OK, but I would like to see a next step.

Adoption - the more interesting things are now happening around adoption. How much MicroContent is going around? How many people are actually using it? The growth of downloadable audio, video, rss are good indicators here. I have to gather some numbers here.

Usage - the more interesting things are happening around adoption. How are people using all that MicroContent. Twitter is here an interesting subject. The same goes for delicious. Personally I just do not use, but other swear by it. What am I missing? How is podcasting going?, etc, etc.

Devices - how is MicroContent evolving on other (i.e. non-pc) devices. Naturally the iPod, Smart Phones, but also car navigators.

Business - how make people money on MicroContent. YouTube and Flickr come to mind. What are the services? What are the business models?

Enough stuff to do some work on.

A big advantage is the the amount of management a user has to do, is much smaller. In the Event View one can drag an event thumbnail and drop it on another one, thus merging the two events. Clicking on the event title allows one to change it. Thus one organises tens to hundreds of images in one go.

A drawback is that changing the contents of an event also changes the folder structure. I do not know why did not leave the folder structure (based on date) alone. Might be for speed. And what is one supposed to do with the miscellaneous images? Create a special event for these?

In any case events greatly reduce the amount of organisational burden for the user. And that is a great advantage in this time of exponential digital asset growth.

And the story line is strictly linear, going from page to page in an album, or from photo to photo in a slideshow. If we are lucky the application can populate an album through an iPhoto Album, thus setting the order of the images. And if we are lucky the title and caption of photos are used to add text to the album.

I see this as a move from an extrinsic to intrinsic story flow. Where we first had to all the work by hand, the applications can now give us a hand by populating the possible flow. And with the increasing number of image we now generate each year (I am now in the 700), this help is really needed.

This automation can only work if we increase the amount of metadata associated with each photo. This metadata can be the title, the date, a caption. But also locations and sorting through events or hand-picked albums. Next step is to annotate the things in the image itself.

RapidWeaver also allows the possibility to create a flash-based slideshow.

The difference between the Photo Album and Photo Blog seems to be the ordering of the photos. In a Photo Album the user choses his own ordering. And in the case of a Photo Blog the ordering is defined by the creation dates of the web-pages with the most recent at the top.

A change of theme does not change the way one peruse images, all themes follow the same model.

In comparison with iWeb this application misses the fancy stuff.

As usual in web publishing applications the photo album in iWeb is pretty straightforward. The main web-page shows all the thumbnails in an album. Clicking on a photo opens a new page with that photo and optionally a thumbnail list of the next ten photos in the album. The user has then the possibility to click on the next (or previous) button for the next photo. Or he can click on a thumbnail to go to another photo.

The story line is that of the original sequence of imported photos. The user can re-arrange photos on the album page in order to adjust the story line.

The context of the album comes from the titles of the original photos and from text that a user can add to each web-page.

It is also possible to view the album as a slideshow. The photos are then show in turn for a short time. Each photo is shown with the title. The viewer has the ability to stop the show, select another photo or go to the next photo. This is a quite neat web implementation.

It might be possible that other web-sites themes offer other story line possibilities. I just checked the

Next the user must think about the order of the photos. In a smart album the user can not fiddle with the order of the photos. In a normal album he can. What can be done depends on the format. This implies that a smart album is no use in creating story lines.

The slideshow format is the premier way of viewing photos in iPhoto. Each photo will be shown sequentially in full screen mode. Optionally the photo title can be shown as context. It is possible to randomise the presentation on photos. An underlying audio track can be added for additional context or just atmosphere. Due to a lack of context, the slideshow does not provide much story line possibilities. A slideshow can be based on selected items in a normal and smart album. The slideshow options allows for changing the order of the photos. There are many possibilities to adapt the presentation of and transitions between photos in the show itself.

The book format within iPhoto allows the user to create a classic photo album. This looks very much like a classic photo album. How much context one can add depends on the album theme. Not all page layouts offer the possibility to add text. Unfortunately the information entered for each photo can not be used as context for the album pages.

iPhoto also has the possibility to create a calendar. This format is a pretty standard monthly flip over calendar, with on one page the monthly calendar and on the other page 1-3 photos. It does not seem possible to add context through text in all themes. however the monthly calendar does add some context. This monthly calendar can be filled through events from iCal (nice for birthdays).

There also exists a Web Gallery format, where a set of images are exported to the web. Unfortunately that requires a .Mac account, which I do not have at the moment.

iPhoto also has the possibility to export to other applications, such as iDVD and iWeb. The story line creation must be done in those applications.

I see several aspects to the story:

• Selection - not all available photos will fit the story line. So a selection must be made. This selection can be automatic or done by hand;
• Ordering - for a story the order of the photos is important. The story line goes from one photo to the next. This story line could follow the the stamp of the photos, but that is by no means required;
• Context - usually a photo needs a context. This context can be given through associated text or audio. A single context might apply to multiple photos;
• Format - one should no longer think of photo albums in the classic format, the books. Photo albums can also have digital formats, such as a DVD, a presentation (video), web-pages, etc. Each of these formats might have other story line possibilities;

I will I add some conclusion to this post when needed.

Progress has been slow for a while. Naturally there has been a lot of action around mashing. However often these mashups can be seen as rudimentary microwebbing. And on the client side not much was happening either.

So I was very happy to come across the MacOSX application Memory Miner. Memory Miner calls itself 'digital story telling' software, which is a good description. The idea of this application is to tell the story of your family based on pictures. For this it uses images of your family, the persons in your family and places. And also the time an image was taken plays a role as well.

The user can add images from the iPhoto library that it deems relevant to Memory Miner. On an image the user can indicate the persons visible by drawing a square around them (similar to Flickr). These persons however are taken from the AddressBook. And the user can assign a place to a picture through integration with Google Maps.

The application can import gedcom files in order to define persons and/or define the relations between persons. When one just uses the AdressBook one can define the relation through a pop-up list: select son, father, etc.

And finally the application uses to the date of the images to create a timeline of your family, your relations, etc. It has interesting search possibilities. So one can look for images with certain persons, in certain places and in a certain time-range. It is possible to publish timelines to the web.

I will do some work on my images and create an example. You can however have a look at the introductory video of the application.

Thus this application creates an extra layer on top of all the images, address cards, we have stored on our computer. It does remind of the 'old' photobooks, where one documents it's holiday, the events of ones life. But fewer and fewer people seem to this anymore. And even fewer annotate the images for posterity.

Memory Miner can help here and the idea can be extended to many other areas as well. I'll get back to that. I see Memory Miner as an exciting example of the next step of MicroContent towards to the Semantic Web.

Digital Life means that there are more and more digital bread-crumbs of yourself around the Internet. And possibly these bread-crumbs will stay there forever, but nothing is guaranteed. And usually these bread-crumbs are beyond our control. The impact of these bread-crumbs on our daily life is an issue in itself.

I did a vanity search on my own name to see what I could find about me and how far I could go back in time. I was able to back to 1993, where I found my first contribution to a List Server. Interesting to see one's history in this way. But there were also things that I could no longer find.

I tried to raise in a workshop at the MicroLearning conference in June 2007. The response was mixed. Why should we have control? Do we need to archive? These bread-crumbs are just like speech: once said, they are lost. This all seems reasonable, however these bread-crumbs are not like speech: they are recorded. And thanks to archive.org will be available for ever.

You will leave these behind after your death, whether you want or not. Maybe one should care what one leaves behind. You can see it as your personal biography.

Anyway I have not yet formed an opinion about this. What should I do? I see the issue only increasing. My digital footprint on the Internet is only getting larger and larger. In the mean time I decided to keep things under my own control and I use only self-publishing. And I do my own digital aggregation. And I re-publish to the well-known services for distribution. So my tweets are archived by me.

This reminds me very much on work that I did years ago. Then I made a split between context services, tele-services, enabling services, IT-services and network services. That happened to be 5 groups of services as well.

The consumer cloud is similar to the context services group. It covers services for end-users. I surmised that there would be multiple context, which were dependent on affinities of end-users. Facebook would be a generic example.

The enterprise cloud would be similar to the tele-services group. I also geared this group to end-users, but with the arrival of context, this is less and less true. The idea is that tele-services will be bought by context service providers.

The enterprise infrastructure cloud would be similar to enabling services group. It would contain any service needed to build an enterprise. This group of services is not geared toward end-users.

The IT-group is for basic services. It is very similar to what Amazon is offering in terms of web-services. And thus similar to the consumer infrastructure cloud. I do not understand why Kerdogan calls this 'consumer', as the services are also used by enterprises.

The communications cloud is similar to my network services group, but also incorporates ISP's, etc.

This makes Internet however very reliable on a single service, such as TinyUrl. See the blog-item by Steve Rubel.

Dave Winer comes with a solution. He suggest that all services should encorparate shortened URL's. And Seesmic showed how that could be implemented. The idea is simple: just put an ID of the page behind the main domain name. So for the Seesmic example Item, the ID is QZ1Y7R6h9Q, which comes right after the seesmic.com: http://seesmic.com/QZ1Y7R6h9Q/. I guess any service can use this approach.

In my case sitution this is more difficult to do. The permalink for this Item is: http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/blog/permalink_shorteners/, which makes a pretty large URI. I can shortened it a bit by using the ID of the blog Item: http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/blog/4496/, which comes right out of the box.

Or I can handcode a URI redirect in the htaccess file. Thus http://www.sivas.com/4496/, points to the right Item. Naturally one should get rid othe www in an URL, they do not serve any purpose. This makes the URL even shorter: http://sivas.com/4496/. And finally one can shorten even more by using another encoding, such as base 36. In my example case this shortens the URL by only 1 digit, creating http://sivas.com/3ev/. And it could be even shorter, when one does not shorten all permalinks. One could create this shortened links on a need basis only.

This would encode all my MicroContent Items with a unique shortened URL. I just have to automate this easy procedure. It would however make my htaccess file very long, but I guess there are other approaches to do this as well. But this gives me full control over it all.

Unfortunately not all is rosy. When I create a Twitter-message, I do not look at the URL, my script picks the URL up and automatically encodes it. I guess I could make this script larger and calculate the length of the URL of the Item and then decide whether it is worthwhile to shorten or not.

From the video it seems to mainly an information reading device, not only books, but also blogs, email and documents. And also Wikipedia. There is some basic web-access?

It is possible to search and annotate the information. I have a feeling that this a troublesome turn. Why annotating? For further usage? Where? On your computer, so we get into the transferring and synchronisation issue. We do not need another silo.

The device looks pretty small (book size) and more importantly it is thin. I used a book reader some 8 years back (don't remember the name of the device), but it was pretty heavy and thick.

I wonder why the keyboard is needed. How often are you going to use that. The device could be a bit smaller.

The bottom question is whether we want to read a book on a device. I have mixed experiences. It does work and I enjoyed doing it. However the synchronisation issues stopped me using the device. So it might work.

My initial interest for this application was naturally the MicroContent view. Each time I start or end the application use can be seen as a MicroContent Item creation. Unfortunately these Items are not available in Wakoopa. The service only stores the aggregated values. So not much MicroContent here.

Based on tags related to applications, the service recommends other apps. There is also a social component: one can join teams and thus influence the applications used by a team, such as MacOSX.

I did not find much use for this service however. In the Mac world there are better usage trackers and application recommenders. But what is more important, I have no idea why I should want to use this.

The iusethis service does something similar. Here is my profile. This service is somewhat similar to my own blog in that it lists the apps that I am using and have docked. The interesting thing about this service is that it also shows relations between applications, so that one can discover interesting new ones.

And then there is the desktop app AppFresh. This applications scans the hard-drive for existing applications, thus creating an application list. Subsequently this list is checked against a public list in order to check application updates. If there is an update, it can be downloaded and installed. This installation process is pretty transparent. If one takes a snapshot of an app, one can always rollback to that version. This is very useful, I already got bummed on an app. The problem is that the app is a bit to transparent and one does not always know the consequences of an update.

In addition AppFresh is integrated with iusethis. This means the apps found by AppFresh can be uploaded to iusethis, and if wanted flagged.

So where is the MicroContent in all of this. I see three parts: the application, the product information and the user input. The application can not be seen as MicroContent. The product information, i.e. the information on the application, can be seen as business MicroContent. Normally this information should be provided by the maker of the product, but in this case it is gathered by users.

And finally the user information. This information can be seen as a very simple review. Already the fact that an application appears on the list in the first place, can be seen as a review. At least the user took a look at the application. The user can only add a simple 3-level rating to this information: favorite, iusethis and is_installed (appears on the list).

I have not yet decided whether I find all of this useful for myself. Att the moment it is just fun to play with. And for applications that I really use, I will detect whether there are any updates available or not.

This service offers many features of desktop MicroContent Clients, so I will discuss the service using that checklist.

The first check is whether the Items in Listphile are MicroContent. Indeed these Items support structure, are flexible (one can extend them) and offer some MicroWeb possibilities through links. There are standard fields, such as titles, descriptions and tags. And each Item has a permalink.

The interface consists of only 2 web-pages: a View-pane and a Items-pane. The View-pane shows a single Item, the location is shown on a map. The Items-pane can be set to maps, lists or thumbnails mode. There are limited sorting possibilities. A separate page is available for a tag cloud.

The service has standard Item functions for viewing, adding, editing and deleting Items. There are only limiting functions for a List itself (editing title, address, etc.).

There are only limited functions for importing an exporting, i.e. no importing and exporting only as RSS and embedded Lists.

The fact that this service is on Internet allows to add some news features. A List can be a social List. This means that multiple authors can work on a single List (still have to check this out). And to help here one has the possibility to see authors and what has been edited. There is some moderation and access control. It is also possible to comment on an Item or author.

I miss the import and export possibilities. I would like to exporting as KML and OPML. I am now locked in. The service is still in beta and I did see some minor errors, but overall it works great.

The way he talks about tagging reminds me of a more formal way of tagging, whereas I would prefer a more informal way. The formal way (and then I am not talking about ontologies) is for me already the method one uses to gather Items is folders. And these can be file system folders or more flexible ones in MicroContent Clients. And this formal way also refers to the colour labels of MacOSX. The formal way of tagging implies a strict use of terminology, where changes are difficult to make afterwards.

The informal way is more flexible and basically you can do as you like. One can introduce errors in this method as well, but those seem to be easier to repair. This informal approach however requires the user to traverse the tag cloud in an easy way, so that ill tagged items can still be found. And traversing should include the relation between tags, so that synonyms, etc can be found. The application that does this well is WebnoteHappy.

Now I wonder how open this all is. Can I create a ringtone myself? Can I download it then to a phone? Which phones are then supported? What does this eco-system look like? And if it is open, why do people pay so much?

Once an image has been geotagged, the location can be exported as Spotlight tags, as EXIF info. Also the images can be exported to Flickr and to Google Earth as kmz file. The app also has support for GPS tracks (can not try that out).

I have mixed feelings about this application. I rather have something that is integrated with iPhoto. I do the Flickr exporting already there. HoudahGeo creates new sets for images with geocodes, but I already have those sets in iPhoto. The export as kmz-file is very nice.

Well I am still grasping with my workflow around locations. I am really waiting for camera producers to integrate GPS.

The question of disruption is interesting. Are there other themes in the MicroContent world worthy of disruption. If I think about audio, video and images, I do see a disruption. For digital images it is all clear, the old camera passed away already. Sharing, printing and taking images is now done in a totally different way. And I guess the same is now how happening for audio. And we are just waiting for it to happen in the video market.

1. Semantic Web - yes that seems to be a few years away still. I do not notice any progress;
2. Artificial Intelligent / Intelligent Agents - seem to be promises still for many years. Although I have the feeling we see it appearing in games;
3. Virtual Worlds - they seem to be here already, however the interest seems to be limited;
4. Mobile - looks a lot more difficult than they thought;
5. Attention Economy - dreaming,...;
6. Web Sites as Services - this is really getting traction, it is here already;
7. Video/TV - Still not here, but things seems to speed up;
8. Rich Internet Apps - not sure if this interesting;
9. International Web - seems a skewed comment. I see it rather going down. People start to visit more and more sites in their own language;
10. Personalisation - falls in the same category as AI, it is not really happening;

Miss portability and identity in various forms. And the future of audio and video;