Do I really need to blog on medium?

I’m still not convinced I want to write on medium as opposed to writing on my own blog at scottwb.com. I do see a lot of social lift from people that write on medium. I am not sure how this is any different than what one might have expected from blogging on tumblr. Perhaps it’s just the current cool kid of the day for the time being?

I mean, medium has some some cool reading features that I like — particularly the estimated reading time and the ability to highlight and comment on a specific snippet. The former seems like an easy enough feature to add to any blogging platform (or to just fake on your own posts by timing yourself re-reading it). But the comment highlighting…that’s something I want for all web pages. Really, I want that feature in the Pocket app. On my Kindle, I love highlighting, taking notes on or sharing highlights, or just looking back at my highlights later, but not all my reading is on the Kindle. I read a lot of articles that I pump through my Pocket queue. I want to highlight the same way there. Perhaps the point is that either Pocket should build that feature…or I should build my own reading queue app! (Stay tuned at my new domain, scottwb.is, for something that may shape up to be related to that notion.)

But I digress…

Why blog on medium? Well…so far, this being my first post ever, the one thing I can say is that I really do like the editor. It’s pretty close to my preferred method of composition: emacs and markdown. Good keyboard shortcuts and hints. Nice autosave draft feature. But what about “branding”? Don’t I want to maintain my own brand, rather than just being a contributor to medium’s popularity? Will this fragment my online presence across yet another site? Even on my tumblr blog, which I use for humorous or inane topics such as “packrat stuff I threw away” and “food concoctions that will make you morbidly obese”, I get my own subdomain and theme. Here, it’s just content. Refreshing for the reader, to be sure, but sort of anonymizing for the author that needs to invest in building his personal and business presence online as part of his career and interaction with the industry.

I don’t know what the answer is yet, but my co-founder, Leif, who owns design, social, and marketing at my company, Facet Digital, has been urging me to blog on medium instead of scottwb.com for a while now. So here, you go, Leif. You can take credit for getting me to sign up for medium. (Well, actually, I needed to leave a comment on someone else’s post so I had to sign up…but after that, you can take credit for me actually writing something). We’ll see how it goes…