Medium is a long-form social message

Simon Owens has written a really nice piece exploring what Medium is trying to do. In essence, it’s melding the long-form blogging of the mid-2000s with the social network effects of the early 2010s to create a viable audience for in-depth material:

But as I began to read the blog and then later spoke to Evan Hansen, a senior editor at Medium who was the initial instigator behind The Message, I realized that it was more than just an arena for early 21st century Web 2.0 nostalgia, but part of Medium’s larger goal of bringing back the web we lost. “I think people do miss the longer stuff,” he said in a phone interview. “And we kind of walked away from it and went into the shorter, more disposable media, and we lost something along the way. I think that Medium is capitalizing on that feeling. The place for longer writing has been lost, so we’re creating that again.”

There’s part of me that sturggles with the idea of giving up my own site to publish on someone else’s platform – but that network of potential readers is so very, very tempting…

Time to have a play perhaps?