I write a lot.
Obviously, not all of it is good and not all of it is useful. On the average day, though, I fire off the equivalent of a novella in emails, technical write-ups, heated forum discussions, and blog posts (both professional and personal).
Back in the old days, the question of where to put your stuff had a simple answer: if you cared, you built a web site. Eventually “blog” replaced “web site” in that sentence for almost everyone, but the idea persisted that anyone who really valued their words would self-host. Today, it’s more complicated. Self-hosting is still seductive for those of us who want complete control, but other services make it possible to tie into the social graph and important stuff like that.
To make things more complicated, the most prolific among us have multiple side projects – branded sideblogs and parallel sites we maintain to preserve a particular voice or focus. I, for example, have a cobbled-together Jekyll blog hosted on GitHub, two neglected Drupal sites for side-projects, accounts on SlideShare and SpeakerDeck, a Tumblr that I use to repost forum and message board discussions I want to preserve, an extremely active Twitter account, a Flickr account that’s getting less attention than it used to, a host of articles and podcasts on my company’s site, and… well, now Medium.
Medium is fantastic. It’s gorgeous. The editing interface is a genuine pleasure to use, and its hyperfocus ensures that I’ll never be tempted to screw around with templating or coding up a new feature when I should just be writing. But that’s a curse, too: Medium may be super slick, but it offers few ways to connect with the larger World of My Stuff.
If I want to put together a portfolio site, it can’t effectively pull from Medium. If I want to write an article with complex figures and footnotes, there’s no way for me to add additional just-so handling to Medium. That constraint means that it will never be my only platform. Is that OK? Does it matter, given how fragmented my work is? Does the network of other writers using Medium make it valuable enough to merit more of my creative energy?
I don’t know yet, but the first service that can provide clear and simple answers to those questions will really win my heart.