Microcontent
MicroContent
This refers to the fact that we are learning more and more through chunks of knowledge, which are easier to produce by most member of a peer community, putting them back together ourselves, rather than using prepackaged macrocontent.
"With the advent of Internet, publishing has become accessible to everyone. People have been creating and gathering content and made this content available to everyone in the world. Where web-pages and -sites as MacroContent. MacroContent enfolds MicroContent.
Completely creating and maintaining MacroContent is too hard for most people. People seem to be much better in producing MicroContent, such as small thoughts, items in discussions, comments, bookmarks, etc. Blogging allows people to write and publish such small thoughts episodically. Each blog entry, consisting just of a title and a description, is automatically merged into a web-page and this is made available to everyone." http://www.sivas.com/aleene/microcontent/index.php?id=C0_63_12
Microformats aim to make microcontent more available and re-usable.
"In my reckoning, there are two business propositions right now in microformats: 1) Structuring data for search and business intelligence, already successfully demonstrated by technorati; 2) Structuring content for collaboration, likely monetized through a service similar to BasecampHQ.
Microformats are really just a way to combine human and machine readability in one web page. Microformats are superior to similar infrastructure plays because the average web designer can incorporate them with very little work.
So, what's the business proposition for combining human and machine readability? Right now, I can come up with two.
The most obvious is structuring content for search and business intelligence. For instance, technorati has raised its own search visibility with the reltag microformat. By helping determine the relevance of given content, reltag also enhances technorati's ability to sell its index data for market intelligence.
A less obvious business proposition for microformats is structuring content for collaboration. Over the past month, I've been having conversations with Mike Migurski of reblog fame and various others including Mark Rickerby and Lucas Gonze. In these conversations, we have focused on microformats as easily identified packets of information inside of web pages.
With the right infrastructure, people could pass these packets around and share them. Mike Migurski and his team are already doing this with full blog posts using reblog." (http://www.unmediated.org/archives/2005/08/microformats_in.php)