Rich Ziade at Basement.org posits The Bite-Size Web
I think we're going to start to see an interesting side effect on web
pages and blogs as content and services become more granular. Content
providers, the Yahoo!'s, AOL's, publishers, magazines etc., will start
to provide their content, in a dynamic form, for placement on other web
pages.
People have talked about the value of separating presentation and data and the flexibility it affords. There hasn't been a lot of talk about slicing vertically and delivering these smaller, bite-size pieces of functionality. As simple API's and technologies like RSS continue to propogate, and as developers start to think in the context of discrete services rather than web pages, the Web is transforming into a Bite-Size Web.
and at the same time, Steve Rubel over at Micro Persuasion, posits Picture in Picture Marketing:
Marketers,
eager to turn their focus to brand engagement, naturally want their
consumers to spend more time on their own sites. So, they are creating
ways to empower consumers to talk to each other. This can take a myriad
of forms from message boards to blogs to full-blown communities and so
on. Unfortunately, consumers may not have the time to pay mind. They
are busy setting up residence in massive galaxies where they can find
people like themselves. These include communities/centers of gravity
like MySpace, blog networks, Flickr, digg, Second Life and so on.
The solution is what I call Picture-in-Picture Marketing. It's the online equivalent of the feature
that's common on any modern television set. Basically you create a
miniature version of select snippets of these large communities inside
your own site. Then, you share your content the same way in reverse -
e.g. create widgets that people can use to decorate their online homes.
TypePad's Widgets are basically a Picture-in-Picture Marketing platform.
These two concepts are two sides of one coin. You can't have Picture-in-Picture Marketing without a Bite-Sized Web. I guess you can have a Bite-Sized Web without any Picture-in-Picture Marketing, but it would be a far less rich environment. Less Bites.
I think we are only just seeing the beginning of a realisation of the power of distribution by Bite Sized Chunks. As marketers wake up to the potential of embedding something valuable in millions of idividual authentic sites, they will have to invent good reasons for that embedding. And they'll have to give something away, whether that is money or kudos or some other form of reward. We will see a collision of advertising and affiliate marketing and a completely new hybrid will emerge.
