Evan Williams, former chief executive of Twitter and the creator of Google’s Blogger, has created a blogging platisher–a new technological hybrid where sites are both platforms and publishers–entitled Medium, which has not only enamored writers all across the Internet, but may also be poised to become one of the web’s next big mainstays.
“We want to create a system where the best ideas and stories reach their widest audience,” said Williams. “Some of those are going to come from professionals, but it is better as a whole if it has very wide breadth of content. Right now, the Internet rewards speed and quantity, and we wanted to make a place where quality matters.”
Which is why in 2012, he built Medium, a pleasant blog site that lets users write and read. An online magazine, of sorts. Anyone can contribute on just about any topic. Even some notable thought-leaders have begun publishing with medium, including CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla Motors Elon Musk, the biographer Walter Isaacson, and former Gawker.com editor Emily Gould.
Although blogging is still a highly successful way of drawing new traffic, with approximately 80% of daily visits coming from new visitors, the tools to craft quality content were getting a bit stale. Williams himself helped build them about a decade ago, and is now ready to innovate the field again.
“It feels like these blogging tools haven’t really evolved in a decade,” said Williams. “When I looked at that, I thought, ‘Do I really want to get into this again? Am I just stuck in a rut?’ I did some investing and incubating, but came back around to this as what I wanted to do.”
Essentially, Medium is meant to make the Internet a more enjoyable place, helping people to sift the best content from the torrent of media that’s published online everyday.
“I read some news, and I think everyone should read some news, but I think we consume news out of habit, and we consume news because our brains are wired to want to know what has changed in the world,” Williams said. “There’s more media than we’ll ever be able to consume, so how do you decide what that is? There’s all these great ideas and philosophies that have been written, reported and shared, and news about some distant and foreign event — in the vast majority of cases — can’t be more important.”
