Usability adviser Jakob Nielsen originally referred to microcontent as small groups of words that can be skimmed by a person to get a clear idea of the content of a Web page.
The second use of the term extends it to other small information chunks that can stand alone or be used in a variety of contexts, including instant messages, blog posts, RSS feeds, and abstracts.
He discourages traditional newspaper headline techniques, such as puns, teasers and other wordplay, which are more effective when the full story is already visible.
The second meaning of the term has been defined by blogger Anil Dash[2] in 2002: In the years of the booming blogosphere the term became important and useful to describe the emerging new content structures that were enabled by new technologies (like trackbacks, pings and increasingly RSS), new types of CMS-software and -interfaces (like blogs and wikis), and not least by new socio-cultural practices (people creating, bringing into circulation and re-using/re-mixing microchunks of content).
Microcontent could be other forms of media like an image, audio, video, a URL (hyperlink), Metadata like author, title, etc., the subject line of an email, an item in an RSS feed.