Out of the blue someone contacted me and asked if I ever co-authored any of my blog posts. He said he wanted to co-write something with me on Medium.
I replied, by email, and said I had not but would consider it. I asked what he would like us to write about. He replied, "Columbus' second voyage to America."
No doubt this topic came up because of the annual controversies surrounding Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples Day which was in the news last week.
In the dream I agreed to work with him on this because it is by writing about things that I learn new things and it was something I actually knew little about. So I asked him to send something and I would edit and add to it, but what he sent was a link to a Wikipedia page about the explorer's second voyage to the "New World." He had not written anything at all. I replied that Medium doesn't work that way. You can't just plagiarize something by taking it from somewhere else and calling it yours.
At this point I woke up and thought, "Wow, that was interesting."
* * * *
After walking along the edge and sticking my toe in the water here and there from January till spring, I was enticed (inwardly moved) to finally dive in head first and swim in the Medium pool to see what would happen. It seemed to me that the only way to really understand the medium was by means of total immersion.
In June I made a six-month commitment to see what I could do with it. The initial attraction for me was that one could import previously published articles simply by copying the URL of your original article (if it's online) and pasting it into Medium, which does most of the heavy lifting for you.
You may still have to tweak a few things to get the look just right, but it's all very intuitive with no HTML required, and the pages are all WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get.) The look is clean and reader-friendly.
The more you are involved with Medium the more you appreciate all the thought that has gone into the platform. There are seemingly countless details that had to be considered which you might not notice as a reader, but as a writer you slowly find out the good people at Medium are looking out for your best interests.
Here's a feature that I especially like as a reader. Each article lets you know up front how long the story or article is going to be should you decide to read it. That is, they tell you how much time it will take you to read this if you start it. For example, when I posted an essay titled Thoreau's Journal, they put a little time stamp there below the header that says Oct 5 - 4 min read. There is nothing more annoying to begin reading something that is 25 pages long when you have only five minutes till your next meeting.
Whereas Blogger organizes content by author, Medium organizes it's content by themes, by using tags to batch content. Another way that this is achieved is through publications. Here is a listing of the Top 100 Publications on Medium. Most of these are Medium publications, though many well known publications have representation here. When you look at the top 100 list you will see that #2 there is The Economist and #8 is the Washington Post.
By reading through the list you can see the kinds of topics people are interested in. Much of it here is related to careers, tech and business, but there are also publications for writers, lovers and crypto fans. Although I very quickly became designated a "top writer" about art here, it's apparent that art is not the most important topic that readers are gathering to in this online blogspace.
Licensing. Another thoughtful feature on Medium is that when you publish your article you can select what degree of rights you want to maintain. I hadn't noticed this at first, but when I learned of it, I quickly adopted it as an important step when publishing. You can choose to make your story a free public domain story via Commons, or you may restrict it from being re-used altogether. I have been trying out different selections, usually offering the right to re-print so long as I am given attribution.
I only recently learned that like the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers, there is a limit to how many free articles non-members can read. But even this has been addressed so that authors can acquire a link that enables friends to read your aticle even if they've already hit their limit for the month. Here is link to my article John Updike's Four Life Forces using this "free access" link.
One more thing I appreciate. Like Quora this is a very international community. I'm being followed and clapped for ("Claps" on Medium are like "Likes" on Facebook) by people with a whole range of unusual backgrounds, from Africa to India to Japan and Latin America. I am reminded of how when I built my first website in 1995 and put my stories online I eventually had three of these stories translated into foreign languages--Croatian, Russian and French. ("It's a Small, Small, Small, Small World.")
Like Facebook, Linked In and other social media platforms, there seem to be continuous changes afoot in an effort to make it better. So far I've been very happy in this new community. There are a lot of folk here striving to help you succeed, and editor/publishers who will notice your work if it is good. I've contributed to four or five at this point now. I'm looking forward to seeing where this saga will lead me. And you're welcome to come along.
RELATED LINKS
Read Ev Williams' The Medium Model.
How Medium Works With Writers (3 min. read)
Meantime, life goes on... Have a great day.
PS: In the "real world" Peter Spooner will be giving a talk at the Tweed Museum tonight on the paintings of David Ericson from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. in the Court Gallery.
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