The Medium is the Message

As some of you may know, I am a big fan of Medium , a publishing site that is (I think) a logical evolution of blogging. For a while now, I have been thinking about moving the magazine section of AwakeNetwork to Medium, but there have been technical hurdles. Those hurdles appear to be gone now, so the question now becomes: do we want to move the magazine to Medium? On the plus side, the writing interface is much nicer than what we have here, and the reading interface is even better. Additionally, since the magazine here is publicly-visible, having stuff be publicly visible on a HUGE site like Medium should increase readership of what you write substantially. On the negative side, the stuff you write won't be on our servers, so it cannot be taken down as easily. Medium clearly states that they do not own the content, you do, and so we *should* be able to delete stuff if we wished. But that puts some trust in them to keep doing the right thing which, depending on your perspective, is either well placed or not.

So, I am on the fence, and need to hear from you. I know the magazine is very lightly used, and the evil part of me is hoping that by moving to a more inviting authoring platform, some of you may end up writing a few more pieces. Or not.

But please note that regardless of what happens on this front, the forum part of AwakeNetwork will not change one bit.

Tom, aren't our articles are public already? Can we control who can access them on Medium?

Chris Marti wrote: Tom, aren't our articles are public already? Can we control who can access them on Medium?

Yes, currently the magazine portion of AN is publicly visible, by design and intent. So there would be no change with respect to visibility, put potentially greatly expanded reach. Of course, they could just silently exist on Medium with few reading them, like my article on "card flipping". I can look into restricting visibility on Medium, but that would not be helpful from my perspective. If privacy is the overarching concern, then I am inclined to leave it status quo.

Jake Yeager wrote: I currently don't use the magazine portion and am not exactly sure what you are referring to. So, given those observations could be good to move them to a more visible "medium."

Click on the "Read" link at the top of your page.

I can look into restricting visibility on Medium, but that would not be helpful from my perspective. If privacy is the overarching concern, then I am inclined to leave it status quo.

Tom, I was only getting clarity on the curent situation. I agree - the articles should stay publicly available.

More on Medium:



And here's a prominent publication on Medium:

medium.com/backchannel

shargrol wrote: Tom could you link to a few good Medium articles to get us excited about what is exciting in Medium? Regardless of what I said above, I have an open mind...

Here is a favourite of mine:

medium.com/@tomotvos/topsies-knock-downs...e-backs-ffa39989daf1

I am enthusiastic about Medium...on the fence regarding using Medium here. I am also frustrated by many of the Medium articles that are product announcements/endorsements, but there is still plenty for me to read there. I will check out the article you mention, though. Thanks.