Is the world ready for yet another way to post a person"s thoughts and content on the Internet? Evan Williams and Biz Stone sure hope so. The co-founders of Twitter, as well as Blogger, have just launched a preview version of their latest Internet publishing tool, called Medium.
The service, from The Obvious Corporation, is all about people writing and displaying their content which is then collected into different themes. In a post on the Medium site, Williams gives his reasoning behind this kind of design:
Collections give people context and structure to publish their own stories, photos, and ideas. By default, the highest-rated posts show up at the top, helping people get the most out of their time in this world of infinite information.
Once the service officially launches, people will be able to contribute to collections or just read and rank them. They will also be able to start up their own Medium collections. While anyone can read what"s on the site in the preview version, just a few people have been invited to actually contribute content to Medium at the moment. So far, "collections" on the site include the photo journal Been There. Loved That, the writing-based page called (what else?) The Writer"s Room, and The Obvious Collection, which describes the efforts of the Obvious Corporation.
So, is this the future of Internet publishing? It"s way too early to say but the clean design and the idea of having user created content in "collections" is interesting. We will see how well this catches on when the final version is launched.
Source: Medium site | Image via Obvious Corporation