Mr. Micro-content (Anil Dash) puts his blessings on Mr. Minimal Designs (Jason Kottke) new Micro-Content approach to blogging.

This is an important moment. Jason Kottke has shown how reviews, quotes, posts and comments can all live peaceably together - in one 'list' (as he calls it.) It's all so minimal and sparse that it's hard to see the difference between each kind of content - but kids today - they seem to like that minimal look.

Me - I'm an old timer who likes texture, color, photos, stationary, video - you know that multimedia stuff - that I got so famous about - way back when. I guess Jason still think everyone's got dial-up. Maybe once broadband hits 75% - these "straw sipping" aesthetics will get steamrolled over by more 'media rich' experiences - but that's not what this important moment is about.

No - this is about the evolution of micro-content. The evolution that started with blogging and which has hit torrential proportions - now that everyone from the NY Times, to Microsoft to every data source on the web - has discovered RSS.

Jason Kottke has shown how various micro-content types can be mixed and matched on one page - and for this Jason wins the "I grok the various kinds of Micro-Content" award! Congrats to Jason!

To do this - Jason had to kludge together five different blogging tools - just to get the effect he wanted (now THAT'S dedication!)

I don't necessarily agree that ALL a movie review needs is: "a title, a link, rating, a photo, and some text." Whatever happened to actors, genre or category and the every popular "length" or "IMDB" unique identifier? Getting the taxonomies right for Reviews is a big deal - and we're working on that as part of an OpenReviews effort.

Even if end-users don't want to fill out all the fields of a properly constructed Review format - those fields need to be there. And what about sharing these Reviews? Isn't Jason tired of having his Reviews locked up in his own personal data silo?

And where are Calendar Events? Doesn't Jason ever go out and DO anything (I know Meg must want to.....)

And what about his Resume? Doesn't Jason ever want a job - again?

But regardless of the imperfections, Jason's designs are 'spot on' - as they say. A real lesson in the future of blogging. What I'm really impressed about - is how clean his thinking is - how focused he is on something - that will be huge years from now. We can all look back on this moment and remember. TIME STAMP.

Here's Anil's original post....

jason rethinks weblog content presentation. kottke's putting more thought into the display of microcontent than almost anyone there, and it's great inspiration for the future of publishing tools [anil dash's daily links]

Marc's FINAL note.....

Notice how I said that Jason's new design is about the future of blogging. He's integrated all his micro-content postings within his blog postings - seemingly assuming that folks want all their micro-content mixed up together - like some elaborate salad, exotic pizza or cold stone mix-in sundae.

But what he's missing - is that this micro-content stuff can stand on it's own - that it doesn't have to be shackled to the browser or tied to intellectual postulating or personal publishing meanderings of one's own data silo.

FREE your micro-content - that's what I say! Don't leave it shackled to the tyrrany of the blog page! Afterall - we know where the idea of a micro-content client came from - right?

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