A few days ago I got into an interesting conversation with my friend Stephen Shankland on Twitter. The conversation quickly broke down with the limits of 140 characters. Stephen wrote a longer response which made sense. Especially, as it turns out, we were on the same page.
What caught my attention is he posted his response on Medium. I remember when Medium launched as a somewhat exclusive service and as I wasn’t considered exclusive I kind of lost interest. Around that time I started work at Apple, and stopped blogging, tweeting and public writing in general.
In the course of resurrecting my little space here, several folks have suggested I write on Medium or at least cross post there. Perhaps I’m out of touch (no argument there, I usually am) but I don’t get it.
Is it reach? Will I have a larger audience on Medium? I’m not sure that matters to me. I write to talk to myself and if anyone else wants to listen that’s cool. There are no ads here and it’s pretty easy to subscribe to posts here (there’s a lite RSS button top) I only. care about reach and audience when I get paid to write somewhere (presumably my content is to help drive readership, so therefore I care)
I’m also hesitant about putting my stuff anywhere. I’m even a little queasy hosting everything here (but I know everything I write or post is saved offline for me automatically.) I already had one really bad experience when my company was acquired, the buyer took my blog of many years down and I lost all access to anything I wrote. Worse for me, it was all lost to anyone that had linked to me or was looking for some nice claim chowder. I like the fact that once someone posts words, photos, videos etc. it will be there for quite some time. That’s the web (at least for me). Too many places where folks out their content no longer exist. I’m also not sure I want my words driving someone elses revenue when I’m not paid. Perhaps that’s selfish, but I do think if peiple are making money from my content, one of those people should be me.
So, what am I missing? Is this blog the wrong medium for me to speak my mind? Do I need to be on Medium? Also, if someone can explain this Snapchat thing to me, I’d appreciate it that as well.