Google doesn't seem to have any definitions on Microcontent or Microlearning, and Wikipedia does not have any entries for Microcontent and Microlearning, either. Maybe we should start publishing definitions and developing these wiki pages?

Microcontent is not too hard to explain, but Microlearning is not as easy to define as it may seem. I will try to find good definitions, starting with Microcontent for now, and post them here. Please do comment if you know any other!

Anil Dash provided a "new" definition in 2002:

Microcontent is information published in short form, with its length dictated by the constraint of a single main topic and by the physical and technical limitations of the software and devices that we use to view digital content today. We've discovered in the last few years that navigating the web in meme-sized chunks is the natural idiom of the Internet. So it's time to create a tool that's designed for the job of viewing, managing, and publishing microcontent. This tool is the microcontent client. [...]
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.

magazine: Introducing the Microcontent Client

Nova Spivack wrote in 2003:

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. [...]
How essential is metadata to microcontent? Can microcontent exist without containing metadata or is metadata the key to microcontent? In my definition above I suggest that metadata is a requirement of microcontent, but that may or may not be the case. Is the definition of microcontent merely that it is "small content" or is it "small self-describing content"?

Minding the Planet: Defining Microcontent

In 2004, Arnaud Leene defined MicroContent as "an extremly small (piece of) information in computer data format". Microcontent Musings: Definition of Microcontent.

As Marc Canter already stated, every piece of microcontent must have a unique URL, the permalink. This allows others to syndicate the microcontent. Note that this will exclude a lot of content. For instance if I add a blogroll to weblog, but do not offer it also as a separate URL, it is not Microcontent. Although it could be.

Microcontent Musings: Characteristics

Martin Lindner posts a definiton of microcontent from TiddlyWiki:

MicroContent being a fashionable word for self-contained fragments of content that are typically smaller than entire pages. Often MicroContent is presented via some kind of aggregation that reduces the perceptual shock and resource cost of context switching (eg Blogs aggregating several entries onto a page or Flickr presenting photos in an album).

mediatope II: Microcontent, definition by TiddlyWiki

What are your thoughts on Microcontent, or do you know another valuable definition? Please let me know.

Tags: Microlearning, Microcontent