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?