World of Warcraft

The New York Times writes:

Less than two years after its introduction, World of Warcraft, made by Blizzard Entertainment, based in Irvine, Calif., is on pace to generate more than $1 billion in revenue this year with almost seven million paying subscribers, who can log into the game and interact with other players. That makes it one of the most lucrative entertainment media properties of any kind. Almost every other subscription online game, including EverQuest II and Star Wars: Galaxies, measures its customers in hundreds of thousands or even just tens of thousands.

And while games stamped “Made in the U.S.A.” have often struggled abroad, especially in Asia, World of Warcraft has become the first truly global video-game hit since Pac-Man in the early 1980’s.

Open Data

Tim O'Reilly writes:

ong before I was calling it Web 2.0, in my talks about the future "internet operating system," I always have had a slide called "A Platform Beats an Application Every Time", in which I predict that the first wave of web applications will be replaced by a second wave of consolidation, which weaves it all together into a new platform. And I provide a view of two alternative futures, one symbolized by Tolkien's "one ring to rule them all," and the other by David Weinberger's "Small Pieces Loosely Joined."
...
As databases built by collective action get to the point of increasing returns, one or more de facto standards will emerge, and may well be owned by one company. They will ultimately, regardless of good intentions, most likely use that market power to limit competition and protect their position. The only defense against it is a vigorous pursuit of open standards in data interchange.

Finding Great Developers

Joel Spolsky writes:

The great software developers, indeed, the best people in every field, are quite simply never on the market.
...
Numerically, great people are pretty rare, and they’re never on the job market, while incompetent people, even though they are just as rare, apply to thousands of jobs throughout their career. So now, Sparky, back to that big pile of resumes you got off of Craigslist. Is it any surprise that most of them are people you don’t want to hire?

Open-Source Innovation

InfoWorld has a special report on new ideas being forged by open-source software:

Across the software industry, countless developers, individuals, and companies are experimenting with open source methods. One reason is because community-driven development allows a software product to grow organically. As Eric S. Raymond observed in his seminal work, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, “Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.” When a group of developers begins to collaborate in an open fashion, each one scratching a unique personal itch, the result is software that expands to fill those functional areas not addressed by proprietary offerings.

Popular, Personal and Social

Ross Mayfield writes:

Every time I see Gabe Rivera of TechMeme, I ask for the same thing -- MeMeme. Give me TechMeme where the core index is based on who I read, about 150 people at any given time, to show me what my friends are interested in. I used to ask this from people who make Newsreaders. Because simply somedays you are too busy to read everything, but you want to make sure you haven't missed something big. That's the real value I derive from TechMeme today. But what I really want find something that is big with my friends, which in the larger blogosphere is actually something small.

TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: Microcontent and Microformats

One of the key ideas for the N3 Web is that of microcontent. Wikipedia has this to say about microcontent:

The term Microcontent has first been systematically introduced and defined by Anil Dash 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.

Anil Dash wrote in November 2002: “The primary advantage of the microcontent client over existing Internet technologies is that it will enable the sharing of meme-sized chunks of information using a consistent set of navigation, user interface, storage, and networking technologies. In short, a better user interface for task-based activities, and a more powerful system for reading, searching, annotating, reviewing, and other information-based activities on the Internet.”

A more detailed explanation comes from Nova Spivack who wrote this in December 2003:

What is a "microcontent object?" Here is one attempt at a definition: It is a finite collection of metadata and data that has at least one unique identity and at least one unique address on the network, and that encapsulates no more than a small number of central ideas, where the number of central ideas encapsulated is usually 1.

For example a Weblog posting is a microcontent object because it is a finite collection of metadata (the fields of the posting as defined in XML or RDF) and data (the content of the posting), and it has an identity and URL, and is generally focused on providing a small quantity of information about a single central idea (although not always).

Contrast this with the concept of a "Web page" or a "Web site" and the distinction becomes a little clearer. A Web site is a complex, compound collection of metadata and data that may be addressed on a single domain-name, and that contains one or more information collections of unbounded size where each sub-collection may itself comprise a Web page or another Web site. A Web site is therefore "macrocontent" rather than "microcontent."

A Web page on the other hand is a little closer to the micro-level, but even here there is still a distinction between a typical Web page and true "microcontent" -- namely that a Web page is not limited to being "small" or to being focused around only a few central ideas (for example, consider the home page of Yahoo -- this is a page but it is not microcontent).
Microcontent is "small content." That is, small, granular pieces of content, each with an unique identity and URI, that may be published, subscribed to, and linked across the network.

Examples of microcontent include typical Weblog postings, RSS/Atom posts, discussion postings, Wiki nodes, or database records that have their own URI's.

Tomorrow: Microcontent and Microformats (continued)

Related Entries:  [All]
TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: Leapfrogging [September 29, 2006]
TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: Content Discovery [September 28, 2006]
TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: Citizen Media and Physical World Hyperlinks [September 27, 2006]
TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: The Near Web [September 26, 2006]
TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: Future of Feeds [September 25, 2006]