My department chair graciously agreed to pay for domain registration on microcontent.info, microcontent.org, and microcontent.net, all of which now point to a dummy page I've set up for brainstorming purposes. I'll keep modifying it as we go, to reflect the direction we're headed in.
It will be a database backended site, so the next step is to get the content skeleton solid enough that the database design can be done.
Feel free to stop by the site and then give feedback to me at ell at mail dot rit dot edu.
Most of what turns up when you search on the topic of "microcontent" is e-mail related. Jakob Nielsen wrote an oft-cited Alertbox column in 1998 on microcontent, which is a list of guidelines rather than the results of research. WebWord did some limited research on e-mail as microcontent to verify Nielsen's assertions.
Corante has a site on microcontent, which is subtitled "the online magazine for weblogs, webzines, and personal publishing"--but which focuses primarily on blogs.
Preliminary searches of academic databases (excluding ACM, whose "portal" doesn't seem to work properly) show no published research on the topic of "microcontent," and only informational pieces on blogs (as opposed to research), so there seems to be a real opportunity here.
I had the pleasure of meeting Alex Halavais and his wife, Jamie, in person on Friday. We had a lovely discussion on the direction this research might take, and I hope that will lead to this blog being revived and a grant proposal taking shape.
We decided to focus in on one aspect of blogs/microcontent, and that was the creation of a resource center for blogging tools and information. We also decided that while the term "blog" works well for those of us using the tools now, it's not ideal for grant language and explaining to non-believers the power of the medium, so we're going with the more academic-sounding "microcontent publishing" for now.
The working concept is to create a "Microcontent Publishing Resource Center," or "Microcontent Publishing Center of Excellence." This would be home to a digital library of resources, from blogging tools to subject catalogs of existing blogs. It would also be a logical source for blogging workshops/conferences like the ones Dave Winer is trying to put together.
The NSF Information Technology Research grant program deadline for "medium" proposals is February 12th...we may try to shoot for that, but we'll also be exploring other possible funding sources.
Because Jill Walker isn't sure she'll be able to commit to the grant itself, we're open to the idea of someone from a third institution to participate along with us. Please let us know--via comments here, or e-mail to me or to Alex--if you're interested!