Recently I stumbled upon a great blog – 11 things I wish I had known before I started my business – a marvellous read, but what I did not notice until later is the site that the blog is hosted on: Medium.
Medium seems to be a blog of blogs – which is curious because I guess I thought we had the web for that. But its founders are impressive – co-founders of Twitter, Evan Williams and Biz Stone – which is one reason I am going to stick with Medium until I work it out.
Another reason is that when Twitter started, I didn’t quite get it. Now I can’t live without it. So I’m putting a bit of trust into Evan, who describes the idea of Medium thus:
Medium is a new place on the Internet where people share ideas and stories that are longer than 140 characters and not just for friends. It’s designed for little stories that make your day better and manifestos that change the world. It’s used by everyone from professional journalists to amateur cooks. It’s simple, beautiful, collaborative, and it helps you find the right audience for whatever you have to say.
Here are three more reasons I’m starting to use and recommend Medium.
- It is so beautifully designed – elegant and very flexible for those who want to take a little extra time about the design of their contribution.
- It is so easy to use – sign up and start posting. Even the super-easy blog set-ups sites – such as Weebly and Wix – are more complicated than Medium.
- You can find or start communities of interest, which is both a pro and a con. The beauty of this idea is that you start to find other writers on subjects of interest. The problem, however, is the whole things starts to fragment again because there are a lot of communities for every area of interest. I wish they did the curating. The content aggregator site, Zite, has a beautiful solution for automatically curating content, which would really add value to Medium.
Check out Medium – I’d love to hear your thoughts.