The Pez Dispenser is a great example of Umair Haque’s “unbundled microchunks”.
You can take several packages of pez candy, unwrap them, mix them up, load the Pez candy into the Pez dispenser and store them indefinitely. The Pez dispenser is portable and dispenses its content upon demand of its owner. It doesn’t dispense all of the contents at one, just in small, individual “microchunks” or pieces.
Umair defines “micromedia” as media that can be consumed in unbundled microchunks.
For example, you can read a single blog post instead of having to buy the whole newspaper to read the one article that really interests you. You can buy the one really good song that you like for your iPod, instead of having to buy the entire album or CD. You can download the only really funny comedy segment from Saturday Night Live, instead of having to watch the entire show and suffer through all the other lame or repulsive skits. You can carry your content with you, and consume this little unbundled morsel at your choosing.
Haque continues by saying that micromedia can also be aggregated and reconstructed in hyperefficient ways, such as blogs, vlogs, podcasts, and RSS feeds. Micromedia can also be unbundled and rebundled for consumers (for example, sorting blog posts by topics or by tags) to create orders of magnitude more valuable than mass media. Haque explains:
Consider blogs. Their microchunking into posts is frictionless; lightweight standards like HTML and RSS coordinate it. This makes blogs plastic: posts can be cheaply linked to, syndicated, remixed, or otherwise filtered and tweaked. The open-access platforms that bloggers use to produce blogs also allow others to contribute complements, like comments, tags, and ratings; making micromedia liquid. Other kinds of services can then access, aggregate, and filter this micromedia, and, for example, individualize streams of content for communities or individual consumers.
Posted by: Hal Halladay | February 9, 2006 3:38 PM | Permalink to Comment