One of the things I have been focusing on lately is home-recording an album of my music. I am thinking I might actually release this one, and of course, if I do, I am going to release it on the web.

Part of my motivation for the iCite net project is facilitating some different ways to distribute and collaborate on music and art online—especially for people, who, like me, don't obsess about becoming more than "microfamous" for their work.

So, the "microcontent" idea that I have been thinking about is basically aggregating works from groups of artists into communities / theatres / galleries. For example, I have a lot of friends or friends-of-friends who are making and self-releasing albums of their music and selling them at their shows or via their websites. Taken together, we could all be like a "record company", but, I think the connection between all of these people is more primarily a community one than a business one.

Theatres and galleries are spaces where music and art is experienced. Usually, in theatres, one pays ahead of time for the show. Usually in galleries, one doesn't pay to experience the art in the gallery, but one pays to take a piece home.

But, the main community idea is that the community is both the people creating the art and the people for whom it is created (or the people who are truly interested in it). What I think is interesting is focusing on facilitating the connection between all these people, and letting them create their own business relationships—which perhaps could be called a "distributed microbusiness model" approach.

What I think needs to be facilitated is a mechanism for the distributed creation of the community / theatre / gallery, i.e., the means of aggregation of individual artists into a collection of artists, and the means of aggregation of individual art works into a collection of works. This shouldn't require any centralization of content.

As an example, all of those friends and friends-of-friends of mine, to a large degree, listen to each other's music. And, as it is a friend-of-a-friend network, there is a constant dynamic of new music being introduced. Some snapshots of what music is interesting in that network at any time could be represented as a gallery of music or a theatre performance of music, and everyone gathered around that could be represented as a community of music (both its creation and its enjoyment).

The "microcontent" aspect of it assumes that individuals and groups will have their own websites (or content repositories), and also that the music listeners will be creating their own content in the forms of reviews or recommendations. None of this content is centralized or lives on a single site.

So, as I have mentioned before, I have some ideas about the iCite net as part of the mechanism of facilitating these kinds of interactions. But, what I have been thinking about really is what it might be like to be able to participate online with artists whose works I enjoy, in a kind-of small underground theatres / galleries communities / businesses that might be interesting to be part of.