Over at peterme (now with green!) the site’s eponymous author offers some SXSW thoughts, which I point to only because he summed up very well two of the panels we both attended, the Microcontent and Starting a Web Business From Scratch discussions.

Regarding his comment on Microcontent:

Now, the atomic unit of feasibly publishable text is no longer the “page,” but the “post,” which could be as small as one word.

He’s on to something here… I mentioned it right after the panel, and then later at the Adaptive Path party when I was in one of my "I’m going to talk over you because I just thought of something cool" moods. What we might (I say might) need is a microcontent browser, which zips between items of content that are smaller than the page unit. I don’t know how it would work, or what it would look like, or what the technological underpinnings would be. Yet. So, I’ll come back to that later.

And, once again proving myself incapable, or at least unwilling, to engage in intellectual discourse, Peter and I drifted on Tuesday night to a discussion of a final product vs. the documentation and detritus of the creative process needed to create that product. Now, I claimed to almost always like the "making of" part a lot better than the final product, which isn’t really a statement that needs proof, but somehow we got into a discussion of proving whether a colophon exceeds a work’s value.

So why am I incapable of intellectual discourse? Because Peter’s cineaste corroboration for why a film like Apocalypse Now can yield a superior documentary like Hearts of Darkness, but that it’s an exception, not the rule.

My illustration of a work and its creation being two parts of a superior whole? "Making Michael Jackson’s Thriller".