Writing on Medium
After a couple of weeks, my impressions from the viewpoint of both writer and reader.
… our goal is to help people pay attention to the most valuable stuff first and to have the best ideas win. — Ev Williams
One of the biggest mistakes made about the future of music/art in the digital age is to reduce the role of ‘the media’ to a marketing plan. — Steve Lawson
My initial thoughts on Medium were positive, both on writing and reading.
Writing is intuitive, serendipity plays a major role.
Highlight a word, or a piece of text, up pops a little window, enabling italics, bold, a link, mark as a quote, or add a note.
It is possible to embed uploaded images, videos from vimeo and youtube.
To the left of the image, you can and should post a credit.
To the left of a video, will appear a link to the video. This I found can be edited, and I usually do.
There was a bug embedding tweets. This has been fixed and now works fine.
Music from soundcloud embeds fine.
Bandcamp does not work too well. The embedded media player is awful, and if the artist has changed their bandcamp address to their own personal address, then it does not work at all. What I recommend, is that you embed elsewhere, then link to. It works fine on wordpress, and you have control over the format of the media player, which you do not have on Medium.
That is what I did when I wrote about FingerPainting by Steve Lawson. I was writing more on the concept, than the music. For the music, I linked to The FingerPainting Sessions.
Notes take a little getting used to, but once you get the hang of them, they are great for little asides and foot notes. Remember to make the notes public, otherwise they remain private, visible only to the writer.
You can leave notes on other articles. I would click save, and for around half nothing happened. I sussed last night why, too long, there is a limit on the number of characters. I divided one long note into two shorter notes, fine, no problems.
With recommendations, I learnt you can edit what appears. This meant going back through half a dozen articles and doing just that.
You can post recommendations onto other articles.
Notes and recommendations for further reading on articles by other writers remain private until they choose to make public. Too many are not playing fair, someone has taken the trouble, and they are not making the effort.
- social media, social networks: social dialogue, network many to many
- broadcast: one to many
But please, do not feed trolls.
Collections are ad hoc, often bizarre and meaningless, often with unnecessary duplication.
I created Art Lovers. It exists, and yet does not show in collections.
Being able to post an article to a suitable collection, is very hit and miss, as that on offer is very limited, and often not appropriate.
You like what a writer has written, how do you find what else they have written? I discovered this by accident. I clicked on their status, thinking it took me through to twitter, to find I was on a page that listed what they had written, what they had recommended.
A noticeable absence is the lack of keywords.
The claim more visits than elsewhere, is simply not true.
Following an unbelievable peak of well in excess of 8,000 visits on the first day, approaching 9,000 on the second day, a week later, now running on average around 100 visits per day. Visits per article, between 1 and 66, one 227,and one, my very first article, an unbelievable 32.5k. Contrast with wordpress, ignoring peaks, typically around 300 per day.
My comparison may be a little unfair. The wordpress blog has been around since September 2009 and has nearly 400 followers.
As always, it is mentions elsewhere, tweets, re-tweets, that appears to determine numbers.
My initial impression as a reader was positive.
An excellent article by Jacqui Cheng on use of social media by inner city kids, another excellent article by Henry Freeman on his quest to find a sword somewhere along El Camino de Santiago, left by Paulo Coelho.
I liked too, the idea of a varying set of articles on the home page, a weekly digest of articles, introduction of diverse reading material I would not have otherwise encountered.
But sadly, I would have to agree of late, with the views of Joe Dunman,and those who posted notes, if the intention of Medium was a platform for quality articles for discerning readers, then Medium is failing badly, as what I am seeing is garbage and trivia. Fortunately I am not seeing blatant selling of goods and services.
What is even worse, this garbage is trending, and possibly being promoted,and worse still, some of this garbage is being paid for, which opens up another can of worms. Why are some articles paid for and others not?
Benjamin Hawkyard has even designed an excellent parody of the garbage that is posted.
You could not make it up if you tried
- The Time I Went to a Personal Trainer
- Because You Quit Facebook
- Why we need a better way to order coffee
- Why I’m not watching the second episode of ‘Betas’
- I’ve Got 50 Trivial Problems
- What My Mom Taught Me About Client Services
- How To Survive A Gin Martini
- I Fired My Startup’s PR Firm
- Why I love Twitter and barely tolerate Facebook
- How I got out of bed this morning
and no, these were not generated by Medium Maker. I made the last one up.
And what makes it even worse, and maybe explains why trending, are being tweeted by Medium.
No, I do not want to see for the umpteenth time, a variant of how I started a start up, etc etc.
Now this may be a reflection of society as a whole, a dumbing down of culture, the attention span of a gnat, but if Medium is to be a showcase of quality writing, ideas, then it should not be happening on Medium.
While it continues to be more and more efficient to put media-type stuff out there, we think there are big improvements to be made in a particular type of media “stuff”: That which is not necessarily personal and not necessarily news. That which we might just call ideas.
The beauty of the Internet is it allows anyone to put their thoughts out there and potentially be heard. But breaking through the noise is not easy. Whole public companies have been created to arbitrage attention online with the cheapest content possible. Knowing these kinds of tricks, building up a large following over years, and/or being hooked into the right social network is as important (or more so) than having something great to say and saying it well if you want to impact and influence today. It is our goal that content reaches its right audience on Medium more quickly and efficiently than it would on isolated islands on the web—no matter who it’s from.
What therefore do we do about it? How do we ensure that what is worth reading breaks through the noise?
As I wrote on blogging, write because you have something worthwhile to say.
If someone has written something worth reading, then please recommend, tweet, post to facebook, tell your friends.
The same applies to music. That is why bandcamp is so good, with one click, can easily share.
If you know an article is good and it relates to another article, post it in a note, make a recommendation of further reading, link the two together.
That is why, if you read something worth reading, hear music worth listening to, tell people, tweet on twitter, post on facebook, make sure your friends know about it. That way we counter the dumbing down, the blandness. Good stuff be it writing, music, spreads by word of mouth. It is the moronic, that has to have a large marketing budget, hype.
One of the garbage articles I came across was how to increase the visits to your blog. Basically, it was spam, spam and more spam. And you have probably guessed, it was writen by someone in marketing.
As I was writing I came across How Long Will I Love You performed by Kristina Train. I would not have come across this recording, had it not been tweeted by Steve Lawson worth listening to. Which only goes to emphasise the importance of recommendation, serendipity in discovery, in enhancing the signal to noise ratio.
We need a report spam button. Click on every article spamming Medium with goods and services for sale. Repeat offenders get blocked from posting.
