The Future of Taxonomic Publishing (2)

What is what the user wants?

What is the user looking for?

One clear long-term trend is that smaller pieces of information are being published. Considering just modern digital forms of publishing, there is a roughly chronological progression toward smaller publications: emails, Usenet postings, web pages, blog posts, blog comments, tweets, tags.

Terry Jones

This is followed by smaller size publishing.

A second trend is a reduction in friction. As access to easy-to-use and inexpensive publishing technology increases, it becomes economically feasible to publish smaller and less valuable pieces of content. We have reached the point where anyone with access to the Internet can easily and cheaply publish trivial, tiny pieces of information -- even single words.

Terry Jones

Finally, this is followed by the desire the publish personal comments, both about ourselves as much as about the piece in front of us.

A solution to that is to make the content alive on the Internet, so that people can not just read it but can do things with it, like adding external links, reuse it, follow links.

Another solution is to break away from a traditional publication at all and serve the snippet the user want: A single treatment in the context of the whole.