Microcontent can be easily transferred between infosystems. Simpler data formats are simply more portable.
By organizing your information as microcontent, you can easily implement various distributed workflows, including
- local checkout of individual items
- consolidation (aggregation)
As the device market gets more complicated, .NET and Java propose to achieve portability through homogeneity, but the browser remains the single (somewhat) universally available client platform. The key difference is that the web grew around portable data formats, not portable code.
In seeking to organize my own information in a decentralized way across devices, I look to the web for data formats, and to decentralized revision control systems like GIT for synchronization architecture.