'Medium' A New Lightweight Publishing Platform and Democratized Distribution

Here we go again --- a concept I’ve read about is either poorly explained or poorly conceptualized:) 

"lots of services have successfully lowered the bar for sharing information, but there’s been less progress toward raising the quality of what’s produced. While it’s great that you can be a one-person media company, it’d be even better if there were more ways you could work with others.” - Evan Williams

All the existing social media sites have their own little angle/s for presenting content and grading or ranking it. Enter a new social media site called "Medium".
I think (not sure - due to murky explanation) Medium proposes to foster improved quality content by having some kind of a people-interactive voting system focusing on content only. But, if you go through sites like Tumblr, Reddit, Stumble Upon, Digg, etc. I believe they already employ this concept in some ways.

Truthfully, the idea of quality content always grabs my attention, but, I don’t quite understand how the new social media site ‘Medium’ has anything new to offer.

At any rate, the two creators of Medium have good pedigrees according to Mathew Ingram posting on GigaOm blog and carried in Bloomberg Business Week:

Medium Advances Web Publishing, But It's No Twitter

Obvious Corp., the startup incubator that Evan Williams and Biz Stone put together after they left Twitter, launched an ambitious new effort on Tuesday called Medium—a lightweight publishing platform the company says is part of an attempt to rethink how (and presumably also why) we publish content on the Web in an age of what our own Om Malik has called democratized distribution. The two previous offerings from Williams and Stone took aim at a similar goal: Blogger was one of the first blogging platforms, and Twitter was the first network to capitalize on the concept of real-time stream-based publishing, or what some like to call microblogging. Is Medium going to be as revolutionary? That seems unlikely—but it’s still interesting.

Williams says in his introductory blog post that Medium represents only “a sliver” of what he and his team have learned about publishing and how it needs to be reinvented. As he notes, the idea that anyone could publish their thoughts for free from anywhere and have people read them was seen as revolutionary when Blogger first started in 1999, but now that ability is taken for granted. So what comes next? Williams suggests in his post that collaboration and the crowdsourcing of quality content are two of the core principles that Medium is based on. As he puts it:

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Good Reasons To Self-Publish AND Good Reasons To Traditional Publish

The much advertised reasons to self-publish have become well known to interested students of the art of late ... But, there are equally good reasons to traditional publish as well :)

Journalist and author, Edan Lepucki, mentions her reluctance to become “Amazon’s bitch” ... I just love that expression!

Mathew Ingram, a senior writer with GigaOM, writes a cool article with many informative links (including Edan Lepucki with a nice list of reasons why a writer might decide NOT to self-publish): 

What purpose do book publishers serve?

We’ve written a lot about the disruption in the book-publishing industry over the past year or so, with Amazon not only creating a huge market for authors to self-publish on the Kindle — thereby avoiding traditional publishers altogether — but also signing writers to its own imprint, and cutting the Big Six publishing houses out of the picture. But it should be noted that working with a publisher can have its benefits as well as its disadvantages, and writer Edan Lepucki has put together a nice list of reasons why someone (including her) might decide not to self-publish. If publishers have any weapons against Amazon, they are on this list.

Lepucki, who writes for a magazine called The Millions and is also an author, says while she sees the benefits of self-publishing — the freedom from a traditional book contract, the ability to control the way the book is marketed, that self-publishers typically keep a larger share of the proceeds, and so on — she has decided not to self-publish her first book. In an earlier essay, Lepucki wrote about how she had given up trying to market her work to publishers, but despite a number of authors describing how easy self-publishing is, she says she has decided to pursue a traditional book deal (others have come to different conclusions: despite some misgivings, Marc Herman says he decided to publish his journalism about the Middle East as a Kindle Single instead of as a traditional book).

Publishers can help a book rise above the noise

One of the reasons the author says she has come to this conclusion is that, while many people seem to see the publishing industry as dead in the water, she still believes there are good publishers out there, that they serve a purpose and that their recommendation of a book has value. As she puts it:

I trust publishers. They don’t always get it right, but more often than not, they do. As I said in the piece that started me off on this whole investigation: “I want a reputable publishing house standing behind my book; I want them to tell you it’s good so that I don’t have to.”

This gets at one of the issues that keeps coming up every time I write about self-publishing, and how Amazon’s Kindle and other tools allow a writer to reach readers without having to go through a publisher. These posts often get comments that could be paraphrased as: “But then the world will be full of terrible writing, and how will we find the good stuff?” And certainly one of the primary functions a good editor or publisher can provide is to filter through content and select the best (of course, that also means that much potentially valuable writing is not chosen).

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