And rightly so, I might add. First Medium made the big push to get online publications to sign up for their publishing program, and then they change the whole thing. This is just one of several quotes from this Poynter piece that I think every small online publisher should read. It's a great reminder that there are no surefire solutions at the moment.
"Right now, we're very concerned about the future of our site's partnership with Medium," said Neil Miller, the founder of pop culture site Film School Rejects. "What we were sold when we joined their platform is very different from what they're offering as a way forward."
Tread carefully with Medium, and any other platform you don't fully own, if possible. This piece still resonates true to me on the matter.
Medium is launching a paywall paid accounts, asking you to be a founding member. This means some of the content on the free publishing platform will be hidden from non-premium users. From the announcement:
You’ll have access to exclusive stories from leading experts, including your favorite Medium writers, on topics that matter not just today, but tomorrow too.
As always, own your content online, if you can. By all means, publish to Medium if you like (I’m playing with that), but make sure your online home is your own.
More Medium, this time concerning the custom domains:
Starting today, we are fast-forwarding this migration by opening up custom domains to everyone and making it quick and painless to transfer.
Custom domains are for publications on Medium, not user profiles. This is a bit like Tumblr, and it’s a lot better than using your publication’s Medium URL. I still recommend hosting your own content, but – again, much like Tumblr, and WordPress.com – this is the second best thing.
With our Publishing API, you can now share your story on Medium from anywhere. It’s easier than ever to plug into our network and build your audience here. There are so many amazing stories, ideas, and perspectives shared here every day, and we want to make reading on Medium even better, with more avenues for content creators of all shapes and sizes.
I still think you should own your primary publishing space, but I must admit it’s heartening to see that Medium themselves built a WordPress plugin for cross-posting. Not that I believe that’s a great idea to begin with, but it might have its place somewhere.
Recode reports that Twitter are planning to go beyond the 140 character limit, with a longform product. Also, this, which I think it’s a no-brainer:
In addition to the long-form product, execs have been openly discussing the idea of tweaking how Twitter measures its 140-character limit by removing things like links and user handles from the count, multiple sources say. In the past, Twitter has tinkered with the limit in other ways. Twitter Cards are still beholden to the 140-character limit but are intended to help people (and advertisers) share lots of information, and Twitter added a “retweet with comment” option in April to give people more room to comment on tweets they share. The company also lifted the 140-character rule on private messages back in June.
This following Facebook’s revamped Notes, a snipe at Medium and other similar platforms, no doubt. Blogging isn’t dead, but it might very well be owned by social networks in the future. Let’s hope not.
Also, hi. Sorry for the silence, it’s been a bumpy few weeks. More on that later.
Thinking about all the great things that make Medium and Svbtle so alluring makes it impossible to ignore Tumblr. If we, for just a moment, try to forget the fact that it’s ridden with GIFs, cats, and porn, this should present itself as a formidable alternative. I’ve got a soft spot for Tumblr, but it’s not so much for the social aspects of the platform as it is for the interface.
I’ve struggled with Medium and Svbtle for some time. Not with the actual services though, their interfaces and stability is excellent and I’ve just got good things to say about the execution. Both services are home to great content, I subscribe to the featured feed on Svbtle and follow several collections on Medium.
Medium screenshot
What I’m having trouble wrapping my head around is what these services mean for someone like me. I really don’t need another place to post content, I’ve got this site and a Swedish one too, along with whatever side project that I’m meddling with at the time. Publishing my words were never an issue, and I’d imagine it’s not much of an issue for anyone these days, with tools like WordPress.com and Tumblr at our disposal. Blogging solved the accessible publishing platform issue a long time ago.
Yet there’s no doubt Medium and Svbtle are alluring. When using these services the content look good, everything is really clean. There are no nasty widgets or crappy free themes to wade through. In terms of freedom to publish, less can sometimes be more. With Medium and Svbtle, you’re just writing and publishing.
Medium’s open for all, just sign in with your Twitter account and you can use Ev William’s latest publishing platform. It’s good, very good in fact, and focused on content rather than anything else. Content first, as it is and were. I want to like Medium, and I do on many levels.
But Medium’s a bad idea for you. It’s a locked canister for your content, a window to the web that might just as well be gone in a year. I don’t doubt that, should Medium go south, there’ll be export options, and the open source community will make sure that you can import your content to other platforms, but all your links will be dead, even if your content isn’t.
That’s not all. When you put your words on Medium, when you move your blog to Google+ or Facebook, then you’re effectively building their brands respectively, limiting and sidelining yourself. Tumblr, Blogger and WordPress.com have all solved this problem. You can connect your own domain to these services, and thus should you wish (or be forced) to move your content elsewhere you’ll be able to move it all.
With Medium, not so much, not at its present state.
Don’t ever rely solely on a service where you can’t move your content, and keep your domain and links, to another platform. In other words, putting your well-thought words of wisdom on Medium, Google+ or Facebook is a bad idea.
Unless you don’t give a shit about what you do, and what you publish online, of course. Then by all means, go for it. And by all means use Medium, it’s the best alternative out there, of the bad ones that is.
I’ve got some random thoughts I need to get out of my system. Luckily, there’s a site for that, so here goes.
Tumblr and publishing. The whole platform is just so titillating, it makes me want to roll out an online magazine and watch the reblogging commence! It’ll be interesting to see what Epic will do with it, in conjunction with the Medium publishing deal (Medium are backers of Epic). The obvious problems with Tumblr as a publishing platform are still the lack of SEO and problematic monetization of publications residing there. I’ve got a playful Tumblr blog myself, by the way.
The verdict’s still out on Medium by the way. I think there’ll be a post on it later on.
Speaking of publishing, shelving the Appricorn project has left me with a number of posts about great iOS apps. I’ll either shop around looking for a publisher for these, or just start cranking them out on a simple site. No sense letting work go to waste, as it would since apps are ever-changing. I don’t think I want to publish them here though, this isn’t an Apple blog after all.
Newsletters. I still want to get started with one, but at the same time it isn’t something you just jump into. That said, I would have done just that, had Tinyletter not been limited to 2,000 subscribers. That’s just silly.
I’m not in the habit of linkblogging here, but if you’re following @tdh on Twitter you’ve no doubt seen the links and commentary there. Having some fun with that, might spin it off in some fashion. Maybe on Tumblr, with a weekly newsletter?
WordPress users might’ve noticed some minor changes to the resource page here. Themes have moved to Bitbucket, and I hope to do some minor updates soon.
I’m writing a novella (or novelette, we’ll see) at the moment. The first draft is almost ready. This is in addition to the iPhone novel (which will see another status update here soon) and the revision of Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog. Speaking of which, the 4th Edition will be updated to WordPress 3.7 (next version) and should release late this year.
My web agency, Odd Alice, is doing well. We’ve started to think about an English site. There are some fun announcements in the pipeline there.
