A tree grows in Medium

why I chose Medium to develop and publish my ‘tree’ structure for the writing process.

Many people have asked, why Medium? What is this…interesting platform? Believe it or not, outside of Silicon Valley few people know of or care about what The Register UK rather scathingly describes as :

“Fancy blog platform Medium”, which “has been burning through VC money at the rate of $50m a year trying to take on the world of publishers. It has certainly succeeded in getting hits — at least within the confines of the Bay Area, where it has become the go-to site for tech musings written by unpaid people who can’t be bothered to set up their own blogs. It claims 60 million monthly readers.”

why not? sometimes I too even write about tech and starting things and that new-not-new thing we call virtual reality.

For my purposes, Medium makes sense:

• The web editor and phone app are truly great. Easy to use, clean formatting, flexible, and kept up to date with digital developments. That this is a platform built within Silicon Valley for entrepreneurs and aspiring ‘tech journalists’ is a plus in this regard. I have enough internal doubts and mental traffic obstructing my writing process; I love that I can rely on Medium to make the writing and posting process veer on frictionless, and surprisingly, dare I say gloriously fun!
• I have my own mini fiefdom adjacent to an established community that widely ignores me (so far). I like the freedom and comforts of this playground, and the voyeurism via participating into this specific community whose attention I might later want to attract. For certain ‘tags’ I have been the only / first to tag… Writing about #lightandshadow is not yet a thing, and I suspect extremely few other art galleries internationally would (or should) consider Medium a worthwhile forum in which to experiment with promoting artists or dealing artworks. Adding other tags, I have seen less than 100, or less than a 1000 posts. Contrast that to #creativity (32k and I just added that for this post — ha!) #leadership (42k posts and counting, as of 10 Jun 2017), #entrepreneurship (130k) and #life lessons (138k) and you get an informal leaderboard as to what’s capturing the interest and tik-tok-taps of our digital overlords. I am not primarily writing about entrepreneurship, productivity hacks, technological innovation, life musings while sipping soylent, but secondarily and beyond leaves me a lot of space to play.
• I may edit and re-publish to infinity! Drafting is not as stressful (be this a good or bad thing for the bulging blogging and content empire) when you can ‘Publish’ and then instantly ‘edit’ and ‘Publish’ (i.e. update). I also appreciate the ability to toggle each post between an ‘unlisted’ (can be accessed by anyone who has the direct link, or linked to via another post or site) and ‘Public’ view (+ listed on my profile and my Stories) and that Medium only promotes your post and notifies followers the first time you ‘publish’ that post with ‘Public’ visibility. As in, my followers do not bombarded with notifications every time I edit a post (ahem, Facebook). And more critically, I can rely on that protocol to incubate (unlisted) posts with their germinated links, as opposed to flagging a private comment that I might lose track of, or starting a draft story in unlinked outer space purgatory (Medium only provides a URL link upon publishing the post, not before whilst in ‘draft’ state) and then ‘Public’ publish the post when I decide it is ready.
• I have this habit of buying websites. And then sometimes they expire. One day that opportunistic *@O( who snatched up kalinaking.com and is now offering it ‘back’ to me for $1,299 will cease and detest and I can reclaim my name and happily park. Anyways: eventually I can embed my Medium feed into one or more websites, or pick and choose posts to share, and all this is supported because Medium has been building first for the techies, VCs and entrepreneurs. But aren’t we all a bit post-website these days? For now I like the inherent future-proofing of posting on Medium.

{…to be expanded}