The Small Wide Web

The following is also my column in Advertising Age this week.

Welcome to 2007. if you thought the media environment fragmented last year, just wait. Things are going to get a lot more micro.

In the new millennium, we've witnessed an absolute explosion in digital media. The barrier to becoming a member of the Fourth Estate has been completely obliterated. And although the phenomenon outlined in Chris Anderson's book "The Long Tail" is a reality, we're still left with a lot of unwanted content.

Consider this: If you subscribe to your local newspaper, you get the funnies -- like it or not. Got cable TV? Then you still have to pay for ESPN as part of your package even if you couldn't care less about sports. Even your favorite blog is occasionally irrelevant.

In the next few years, the "microchunking" of the content will take us deeper into our interests even more than the recent niche boom has.

Technologies such as RSS and web widgets are already enabling millions to digest only the slivers of content they care about on an a-la-carte basis. People are forgoing the rest.

Microformats, another emerging standard, will make things even smaller. The technology allows publishers to categorize information within a web page, such as event listings, so that they are more easily discovered through niche search engines.

Media brands that ignore this trend will become irrelevant in a world where aggregation is king. Several key players, such as Google, have embraced the opportunity to take microchunking mainstream. Google's personalized home page, one such platform, is already one of its fastest-growing services.

But the aggregation opportunity is everyone's. Marketers must recognize that people increasingly will consume content in small bites, not large. Brands have an opportunity to introduce consumers to this content by creating platforms where people can aggregate the niche content they care about. In addition, they should move now to make sure existing online investments are ready to be chunked down so people can integrate it into other platforms.

Tags: microchunking, microformats, LongTail, content, media

Comments

[Pascal Venier]

... what about flogs, then? ;^)

[Jamey Shiels]

Very interesting post with respect to how companies can create opportunities to dialog with consumers in a very specific fashion. To me, the word 'micro' doesn't seem to be an effective modifier to fully explain how companies can break apart products to allow consumers to drive deeper and find the specific details their interested in following.

Interesting discussion

[MikeC]

i wonder however if people will begin to loose perspective the more focused the content they read.
It's very possible that people will know a lot about one thing and not much about anything else.
Even if we don't care about some information, it's still good to know what's going on elsewhere.

[Colin Donald]

Hi Steve,

I completely agree with your observations about the importance of microchunking and microformats. For a presentation that my company gave to brand managers on this subject, we coined the phrase "Liberate Your Content" to emphasise the need to let people take brand content as easily as possible so that they could share it with family and friends via the private blog networks that are being enabled by systems such as Six Apart's Vox (previously Project Comet). There's a summary of the presentation with diagrams here:

www.futurescape.co.uk/content/view/16/27/

[You Mon Tsang]

I agree. The relevant aggregation of small chunks is the future.

Been thinking about it a lot at Boxxet.

Also, Dylan Tweney did a similar and strong post on the livable web, which is well worth reading.