Let’s get small

I caught a quick snippet on the radio recently of Steve Martin’s “Let’s get small” comedy routine, and it triggered a thought process on applying the concept of “getting small” to content management. Just how small is small, defined in terms of being useful, and how would you use something really small? Early content management solutions focused on managing large document sets, measured in the hundreds or thousands of pages. As the underlying technology has improved, the unit of reference has continued to become more granular, to the point where we can now comfortably manage sentence fragments across a broad range of deployments. Why does this matter? Because the contextual use of “small” has become more relevant with the rise of mobile media; a two inch screen presents a different set of challenges for delivering an advertisement to an end user. This would not have been possible a few years ago, and there would have been no pressing need for it. Now there is a need, and it is also possible to deliver micro-ads in context, driven to a great extent by the rise of Component Content Management systems. But how do you pull this together and deliver? I’ll go into more detail on the next posting.