FINDING A HAPPY…MEDIUM
Image via Medium
It’s only been about a week, but new medium Medium —see what I did there?—already has social media gurus redoing their Powerpoint slides. Some have called it “Pinterest, basically” while others aren’t sure what to call it. So what is Medium?
To begin, you can learn a lot from the play on the word “medium”. Medium basically seeks to find a balance between the crazy, unraveling mess which is endless content, and the careful, tightly edited feeds of traditional publishing. One insightful view comes out of Joshua Benton, who notes a key feature of Medium is in that it “denies authorship”, instead focusing content around a particular “collection”, or categories, of things. Medium allows users to upload content around these collections, which then get voted as being useful or not by the populace. So it’s not just Pinterest, it’s Pinterest AND Reddit (with some Tumblr thrown in).
One thing I’m interested in is how it would handle text-heavy works as we’ve seen a recent skewing of most platforms towards images. This trend continues with Medium, and, so far, reading text on it is a bit unwieldy.
Right now, submitting to Medium is limited to insiders, but anyone can jump on and start poking around. What do you think? A happy medium? Or a long shot?
