In the early adopter tech media echo chamber, there’s a little bit of a “blog renaissance” going on right now. (Which I’m enjoying, even though blogs never really went anywhere.) One of the sparks was Lockhart Steele’s post on The Verge back in August, “The retro-futuristic future of blogging,” timed with his reviving his own blog. I loved this line:
at a time where #longform is a hashtag known to all, perhaps it’s time for #blogging to reclaim its seat at the table, too
While the people that never left just shake their heads, a few of us have come back to the table, using Wordpress, Tumblr, Medium or even a weird, retro command-line thing-a-ma-jig. Andy Baio, a contributor to The Message, is now blogging regularly again at Waxy.org, and he explained why in his (short) post Middling. I’ll quote from it, and it’s important, so I’ll make it big:
Twitter’s for 140-character short-form writing and Medium’s for long-form.
I think this positioning is dangerous for Medium. It positions the product (and the company) as being about one type of story, and closes us off to different types of writing. And while I truly believe that Medium is the best place to write long-form stories on the Internet, I don’t think that’s enough.
Medium should be the best place to share stories on the Internet, regardless of length.