November 9, 2013

After Twitter got so many people blogging short, Medium means to lure us back to blogging long.

A NYT article about Evan Williams, a Twitter co-founder, whose new project, Medium, is a return to old-school blogging, which some of us never left.
Mr. Williams... says he’s reaching back to the once-du jour notion of blogging because, in the frenzy to build social communications tools, something has been left behind: rationality....
But there is something new: aggregating blog posts onto a main page like Twitter's:
He’s carrying out ideas he toyed with in his first big commercial venture, which was called, simply, Blogger. He sold that to Google a decade ago, begetting his first millions. 
I've always been on Blogger — so thanks to Williams for Blogger — and I already have a readership, but for someone starting blogging now or feeling ignored on Blogger, Medium might be a great choice, since it might drive readers to you and gives you access to a system that might work as a marketplace of ideas.
The algorithms that are designed to cut through the noise to the music worth hearing measure things like the items people read and recommend the most, Mr. Williams said. It then distributes those more widely to others who use the platform. The concept sounds like an amalgam of ideas already in practice — such as Facebook “likes,” or tools used to vote up stories at Reddit, or most-emailed lists. He describes it as a “holistic” model that brings together many tools, including some still in development....
By the way, Medium does look great, in part because there's none of the clutter of advertising (but that means there's no way to make money, and they're toying with charging for subscriptions).

9 comments:

rcommal said...

I am put in mind of Peter Allen's "Everything Old is New Again."

Paddy O said...

A good place for the child of mommy blogger to set up shop.

Jill said...

Gag. Every post there was about "me."

YoungHegelian said...

The algorithms that are designed to cut through the noise to the music worth hearing measure things like the items people read and recommend the most...

Oh yeah, that's an algorithm that'll help ensure a high level of discourse -- how popular something is. There's just no way that the Kardashians' antics will be more popular than a socio-political analysis of what caused the years of terror in the Congo!

How about an algorithm that counts the use of the words "heuristic" & "bifurcate" instead?

Wince said...

Really looks like a Twitter add-on. You must use Twitter to sign into Medium.

Authorize Medium to use your account?

This application will be able to:

Read Tweets from your timeline.

See who you follow, and follow new people.

Update your profile.

Post Tweets for you.

Marc in Eugene said...

Signed up to check it out. I forget where 'cisgender' came up here, just recently, but there's an enthusiastic explanation of the notion by Loraine toward the top of the page Medium constructed for me-- "Hi, I'm Marc and I go by 'he' and 'him'."

n.n said...

The Twitter revolution was a combinatorial disaster waiting to happen.

tim maguire said...

I just read the three currently most recommended: 2 were shallow ignorant BS and 1 was serious, earnest, but with a giant blind spot (her male feminist friend moonlights as a troll attacking feminists on twitter and her complaint is that, while "trolls gotta troll" it would be better if he left feminists alone).

Danno said...

This guy must "hang out" with people who have short attention spans, so as to think this is a novel idea. I chuckled when I saw the sentence, "Posts then appear in collections, or channels, like “Adventures in Consumer Technology,” or “Best Thing I Found Online Today.” where he is many years behind Althouse. I say thanks to Ann for her very wide array of interesting blog topics, which takes a lot of reading to find and summarize.