2008 has played host to a near continuous stream of micro-websites, from the Obama-philic ( Your New Bicycle, When Obama Wins, Is Obama President? ), to the news-oriented ( WTFDINTK, Dow Jones Tumblog ), to the practical ( Umbrella Today?, Now Do This. )

It might be tempting to view the success of microsites in light of our society’s ever-diminishing attention span, to write them off as ephemeral bite-sized mind nuggets that garner their popularity through an appeal to a lowest common cultural denominator.

But let’s shelve hoity value judgements.  What can microsites teach us about creativity on the web?

Digital technology is profoundly powerful, probably more so than any creative advancement which preceded it.  But it’s not simply powerful, it’s polyvalent: it can be used to accomplish most anything.  The web has helped elevate each of us to the status of tiny gods, techno-demiurges.  But all this creative power has swamped us.

And it has made us boring.

Microsites succeed, and succeed wildly, in part because they resist the intoxication of digital power.  Like grandma always warned, with great power comes great opportunity to eff everything up.

Creativity consists in choices well-made.  But meaningful choice becomes almost impossible in the face of countless options, and the plasticity of the web overwhelms us with possibility.  Furthermore, for a creative work to be effective, to engage our interest and win our esteem, we must be able to percieve (even if only unconconsciously) and process the decisions implied in its creation.  And our ability to discern and perceive is too often hampered by a sea of overstimulation. 

Microsites attend to the problem on both ends.  Through a radical reduction in scope, the creator makes each of her decisions more relevant, more expressive, and each option more evident.  At the same time, by simplifying the user’s experience, by rejecting all but the essential, the creator reduces the strain placed on the audience in identifying and ultimately connecting with their creative decisions.

The wisdom here is echoed in Gruber’s advice on building great iPhone apps:  ”Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience.”

We might call this strategic myopia.

But the broader lesson, which may border on the absurdly obvious, is:

 Creating great things depends on finding ways to make each decision more expressive and more evident to your audience.