Sorta-Kinda Blogging, on medium.com

I’ve posted my first entry at a new “blogging” site, called Medium. From the post’s title and subtitle — “Scribbling in Books: To ‘deface’? or to ‘annotate’?” — you’ll pretty much know what it deals with: my (evolving) approach to “enhancing” the existing text of books by underlining, highlighting, and adding marginalia of my own.

Less obviously, the post is also about blogging on a new platform. Why bother? Why not stick to Blogger and WordPress?

Medium has been open, on a limited basis, since September 2012. I don’t know if I heard of it back then, but my first actual visit there took place just a few weeks ago, in the days immediately after the Boston Marathon “bombing.” I found the site more or less by accident, when someone or other whom I follow on Twitter posted a link to a piece called “Racing News: Hunting the Manhunt in Watertown.”

On one level — as information, as news — that article didn’t break any new ground: I’d pretty much read and absorbed the important “facts” elsewhere. On another level, it bowled me over. The author, a young man named Taylor Dobbs, says he is a journalism student at Northeastern University; I was impressed not just by the writing, the story-telling of his first-person account, but by, well, by the way it looked. (I’m never so absorbed in current events that I lose susceptibility to superficial distractions.) Was this, I don’t know… was it some kind of magazine? What else were they featuring? What was this?

Medium is the brainchild of a guy who clearly has a knack for brainfathering, one Evan “Ev” Williams. He co-founded Blogger. (He actually coined the word “blogger.”) He co-founded Twitter. He doesn’t need to co-found anything else. But here he is, presenting us with a third offspring which offers advantages, arguably, over those platforms and others in the same bailiwick.

Because Medium is still new, with limited participation, there’s no way to tell what it will ultimately become. So far, it seems to follow the outline which Williams sets forth on the Welcome/About page:

1. Medium lets you focus on your words…
2. Medium is collaborative…
3. Medium helps you find your audience…

I myself don’t care that much about #2, to the extent that it suggests “social networking.” (Apostasy!) It lets readers comment on individual passages (Medium calls these “notes”), and the platform includes — maybe for obvious reasons — numerous hooks to Twitter. (You need a Twitter account to post on Medium, even to add notes, although anyone can read the site’s content.) Each note is limited to 200 characters max, though, and so far no built-in linkage to other social networking platforms is automatically included.

One feature which I may want to explore at some point: you can invite specific other Medium folks to collaborate with you on a post. Other blogging platforms offer similar features, but these tend to be almost afterthoughts, rather clunky ones at that. (You accomplish this elsewhere, I think, by making someone a co-author of the whole blog, not just of an individual post.) Medium’s approach seems well thought-out.

But let’s talk about #1, the focus on words. This starts with the slogan from that image I included at the top of this post: Not too big. Not too small. If you spend some time looking around there, you’ll find posts just a couple of hundred words long, and posts, well, much longer. (My scribbling-in-books thing comes out to about 1100 words: not unusual for a post here at RAMH, but then I wasn’t trying to adjust the length one way or the other.) Once published, each post gets an automatic annotation which tells potential readers: This one will take about a minute to read, or This one will take about five minutes. And so on.

As for #3, oh boy…

Blogging is — well, let’s say can be — hard work. The hardest element of it, especially for someone not given to (a) writing repeatedly about the same topic, (b) socializing, and (c) self-promotion, is finding (and keeping) readers. In your blog stats, you can find reassurance (or not) that someone continues to read, and you may come to recognize some of them as repeat visitors (even to recognize which repeat visitors). But from a reader’s perspective, you’ve got so many blogs after your attention, y’know? Reading and participating meaningfully in a consistent handful of conversations, daily, becomes almost impossible. That’s why individuals drift into and out of most bloggers’ audiences, and the disappearance of known readers — dispiriting (albeit understandable) as it is — represents one of the main reasons people give up on blogging.

So along comes Medium. It’s something like a magazine, with a substantial number of at least sporadic contributors (even at this early stage). The site also has editors, who offer a revolving selection of “Editor’s Picks” which highlight posts possibly of interest to readers.* Each post belongs to one or more categories, and you can create your own categories as well as posts. (The categories may be open or closed to posts from others.) Most importantly to me, it delivers a known sort of reader: one who hasn’t come there in the expectation of just blowing through on his or way elsewhere.

I don’t know how often I’ll post to Medium. (I don’t intend to give up RAMH, I know that.) For all I know, once the novelty fades then Medium, too, might mutate into just another online meet-and-greet cafe. But I’ll try to give it a go every now and then, just to see what develops.

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* Note the singular Editor’s, not plural Editors’. I don’t know how they make their choices. My “Scribbling in Books” things made the list within a day of publication, which felt exciting but also, y’know, felt a little strange — like a pretty girl had invited the awkward adolescent me to the prom. Maybe seeking editorial approval of other kinds of writing has just made me cynical?