Microcontent

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The term microcontent has first been systematically introduced and defined by Anil Dash^[1] in 2002:

"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. A day's weather forcast, the arrival and departure times for an airplane flight, an abstract from a long publication, or a single instant message can all be examples of microcontent."

In the years of the booming blogosphere the term became important and useful to describe the emerging new content structures that were enabled by new technologies (like trackbacks, pings and increasingly RSS), new types of CMS-software and -interfaces (like blogs and wikis), and not least by new socio-cultural practices (people creating, bringing into circulation and re-using/re-mixing microchunks of content).

Microcontent could be other forms of media like an image, audio, video, a URL (link), Metadata like author, title, etc, the subject line of an email, an item in an RSS feed. In 1998, Jakob Nielsen offered tips^[2] on how to write usable microcontent.