I’ve spent some time in the last few days poking around on Medium. I haven’t been paying a lot of attention recently to online blogging and publishing technologies so my own writing life has settled into a well-worn groove. Today, I set up an IFTTT recipe to auto-post my blog entries from here on Medium, just to see how that works.
Medium is a strange but interesting place/idea. In one of their own blog entries, I ran across this summary of their (apparent) benefits: “a fully hosted writing platform, distribution of stories to a community of engaged and thoughtful readers, the clean aesthetic for which Medium is known, and innovative features like Text Shots.”
It seems like the first three points are the big draw, particularly the idea of easy distribution of stories within the Medium community. In this respect, it’s sort of like WordPress’ hosted platform which provides tools for the sharing and discovery of other peoples’ blogs you might find interesting. Having spent some (but not a lot of) time with Medium, it does feel like the level of discourse is above that at hosted WordPress, but I don’t know the relative size/reach of each of them. WordPress clearly has tons of features that are missing from Medium, which, after all, claims simplicity as one of its primary features.
In any event, this will be my first cross-posted article to appear on Medium as a result of the IFTTT recipe I created. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, happens as a result. I’m expecting nothing so I know I won’t be disappointed. 