The Internet, when viewed through a Browser, provides access to what now amounts to billions of pages of searchable content. The Browser though, as its name indicates, was only designed for the display and navigation of information. Today’s knowledge workers need capabilities beyond what the Browser was designed for and are looking for ways to extract valuable pieces of content from the flow of information and reassemble those pieces for specific uses.
These pieces are known as microcontent and can be anything from a link, a paragraph, a page, a part of a page, or an individual idea, picture, file, message, fact, opinion, note, data record, or any other kind of “content object.”
Our contribution to this emerging space is QuickDraft, a client application that works in conjunction with a Browser. It functions as an interactive workspace that allows for:
- the rapid assembly of links, files, data, images and other relevant items of interest,
- subsequent easy manipulation of the collected microcontent,
- simple addition of annotations and commentary, and finally
- one-click publishing.
QuickDraft is a microcontent management and “rapid assembly” publishing application that is specifically designed to speed up the process of content creation by quickly generating a “first draft” of the ideas that users want to communicate. The application then allows for editing of the “first draft” before making available its fast one-button publication features.
QuickDraft becomes the organizing mechanism – the “hub” – for gathering information from any and all sources, then using annotation and sequencing – storyboarding, in essence – to filter & recombine information in useful ways before presenting it either as views or as feeds for other consumers.
In the coming microcontent-driven Web, information will also be published in discrete, semantically defined "postings" in addition to traditional content such as files, Web pages, data records, etc. Weblogs are an example of this trend and we hope that Bloggers will be the vanguard for this type of tool.
The purpose of this Weblog is to introduce the concept of QuickDraft to a broad audience and recieve their feedback such that we can create a product that improves both the quality of the conversations we are having through weblogs and allow the participation to expand to a wider audience.
