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(a brief summary of the paper delivered at Blogtalk Downunder, 21 May 2005)

"Granularity" refers to the scale of detail of parts within a larger item.

Granularity has allowed blogs to be woven by the network. A blog consists of multiple posts but also multiple links in and out. These links point to parts, not wholes (individual entries, not entire sites) and it is the presence and density of these links that are fundamental to blogs as emergent systems

The situation until now:

For example, the Web can be considered highly granular because it is made up of many millions of individual parts, each of which appears well suited to being interconnected in quite unstructured ways.

A book, on the other hand, is more monolithic, less granular (the pages are usually designed to be used in a fixed order, and to reference an individual page or paragraph you need to refer also to other parts of the book (e.g. the title page, publisher info)

A video is not really granular. You can link to the whole video (including credits etc.) or not at all. For a web page to quote a single phrase spoken in a video, it is currently necessary to download the entire video, then find and play the phrase.

The author suggests ways to make video more granular and thus more finely quotable on the Web in general, and specifically in blogs.

Full paper: Adrian Miles - Media Rich versus Rich Media (or why video in a blog is not the same as a video blog)