Small format niche

Is she exhausted by Twitter? The latter, they say, is good for quickly spreading news. Ok, what else? There is a simple thesis: it is easier for people to generate content in small formats. And even easier for people to work on complex things collectively. For example, the vast majority of modern scientific articles are co-authored. Moreover, a scientific article is a relatively large format that was once set by the existence of paper journals. There it would simply be impossible to publish short abstracts in one sentence. In fact, the ideas of articles can often be presented briefly “on the fingers”, almost in twitter-format. Scientific activity is not the only relevant example. Habr's experience is also interesting - the size of posts is influenced by positioning the resource as serious, where you cannot abuse the attention of a large audience by publishing short thoughts immediately after they appear in your head. By the way, as I understand it, you can not publish a post in Habré in collaboration, which raises the requirements for a single author.

However, people often have raw thoughts in which, nevertheless, “there is something”. The ability to publish them, at least in some special category of short posts, would probably significantly accelerate the interaction in a group of people with similar interests. And in some cases would have led to serious results and articles. I don’t have to do this on Habré - I’m talking about the need for new resources with small-formatted content, focused on serious applications. Type of crowdsourcing. Or, as I call crowdsolving, when there is no specific customer, but there is free collective creativity to solve interesting problems. The latter things even represent the trend.

It seems to me that it also interestingly lies in the concept of the “Internet of data”, in contrast to the Internet sites proposed by one of the founding fathers (I forgot the link). In the tradition of the semantic web, assign URIs to anything, including even real-world objects . Short claims of significance could also have their own URI. Assigning a URI to a small content object with meta-data about the author would be somewhat similar to publishing an article in journals or resources like Habr.

In conclusion, I want to note the idea that has already been expressed . For convenience of perception, people broke up large forms derived from the “paper heritage” into various categories - review, essay, review, interview, etc. The division of small format content into categories also exists - argument, thesis, consideration, opinion, comment, question etc. I think that in future resources this categorization will somehow be explicitly declared, because assigning status to the content helps to recognize it and makes it easier to work with it, and even in part can serve to rank the content (for example, in the perception of This argument has a higher status than opinion).
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Update from 11/11/2012 Shkolnik received an investment in the development of a mobile application that automatically compresses news to 400 characters, keeping their meaning.