Overview: Social Web

"LinkedIn is emailing the 500 people it calls its “Influencers” and asking them for permission to automatically hand their stuff to other sites that want to republish it in full.... Influencers get more distribution for their names and ideas... LinkedIn gets to advertise LinkedIn... letter to Influencers asks for permission to translate their p…

Last week’s edition included 13 links across 3 topics. This week I go the ‘Special Edition’ route and focus on one topic: Medium. 

I think the distinction between platforms and publishers is misunderstood.

IN RESPONSE TO: Thanks for sharing this.  “While this makes sense it would make more sense if Medium existed in a vacuum… most authors are prepared to put up with a second-class authoring tool in return for a shot at a first-class audience. ”

"The EU Commission and Parliament probably spend hundreds of millions of euros on comms projects every year, but almost nothing on stimulating the emergence of the European Online Public Sphere..." - Posted to Story-Europe's Medium publication to give Catalyst project some content to kick DebateHub’s tyres with.

So I put together a landing page, sent a few newsletters to myself, then wrote a post on Medium. It featured 75 outstanding pieces of journalism ... my Minimum Viable Product. Naturally, nobody showed up to read the post. Then, somehow, Rand Fishkin (the CEO of Moz.com) found it and spread the word " - The Medium Viable Product — Thoughts on…

Absurdist is a relatively young publication that I’d launched on Medium on December 31st, 2014. At the 6 month mark it had already grown past 10k followers, pulling in anywhere between 50–200k reads a month. It takes a lot of work and collaboration to build and grow a publication. - Building a Publication — Yung Rama — Medium

What separates Medium from everyone else is that responses create this amazing platform for discussion and stories breed their own little ecosystems. So why don't we treat responses and their result with as much respect as we currently do recommendations?... a story that inspires twenty responses is more "successful" in my opinion than one that…

"there’s something missing in terms, I think, of the user experience of linking content to a particular author. - Medium has a small author problem — Medium

While most the activity on LinkedIn occurred within the first 24 hours after posting, Medium was more of a slow burn... led to shares from outside networks. Of the 1,500 views of my article, 500 came from Facebook, 400 from email, and nearly 300 from Twitter... For years, we’ve been warned away from such tactics... in a world in which Facebook …

IN RESPONSE TO: The numbers game can get so depressing. "In order for Medium to be a good place for writers to get feedback, everybody has to lighten up a bit. The platform isn’t helping. The comment feature adds to the social constipation... following the conversation feels like digital spelunking." - In order for Medium to be a good place …

IN RESPONSE TO: Why Fiction Writers Should Find a Home on Medium "I turned to Medium with the hope of cultivating an audience, but I’ve become a bit disenchanted... if you don’t already have a bit of a following OR better yet the power of numbers that joining a publication provides, your work has a slim shot of getting viewed." - I turned t…

IN RESPONSE TO Medium Would be a Much Better Network with Direct Messaging... I’ve seen far too many new social platforms I’ve used collapse under the weight of the “navel-gazing debate” of users. - The tricky business of social platform development — Medium

If you’re a fiction writer, Medium may feel like a place you can go to for practical tips and encouragement about writing and networking among many other practical ideas on a variety of topics, but it may not feel like a place for publishing your latest short story. But Medium is a rapidly growing network that’s perfect for fiction and nonfiction …

IN RESPONSE TO The Web We Have to Save... Unlike a blogger, it’s very hard to isolate and ban Facebook or Twitter. A blogger can be placed in jail, a network of people on a platform with millions of users is much harder... [BUT] these platforms have their own censorship mechanisms... Facebook is doing better now but ... many things were bloc…

in some ways, it feels like there’s a wall between users on Medium. Currently, the only two ways to communicate ... are through Notes and Responses... communication can quickly get lost. It’s hard to keep track of all the conversations you’re having without one central location ... And why are Responses treated as posts? ... Responses taki…

"I can accept that. Here are my theories on why Medium sucks and I would like for people to tell me why I am wrong.... Why are comments so deprecated here? ... The recent I Racist post ... garnered 33 “notes” on one paragraph... it is painful to read as a bizarre little sidebar on the side of the page... nobody is here. Everyone is cross po…

The conversation continued through various responses and notes in different responses, blooming outward, but at that point to actually follow it you needed to perform a very impressive feat of what Gutbloom so aptly calls “digital spelunking”. Which then led everyone to discuss what could make the social part of Medium better... the thing I’d m…

I don’t post on my website anymore, at least not with the goal of getting any traction. Instead, I post almost entirely on Medium... the success I’ve see on Medium is in direct correlation to my commitment to sharing my voice .. create and share, not for the sake of getting anything in return, but do so because you are choosing to be generous…

The rich, diverse, free web that I loved - and spent years in an Iranian jail for - is dying.Why is nobody stopping it?... The hyperlink was my currency six years ago... represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web ... a way to abandon centralization ... and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes an…

How do you get recommendations? Well, you need to get your writing into a publication. Doing that is not easy - Is Medium Balkanized? — The Coffeelicious — Medium

There’s been a very interesting meta-conversation on Medium going on recently. Roughly it falls into one of these two categories:... responses seem to receive more attention (recs & follows) than my “regular” posts... It feels like contribution, not just a comment. - Medium is a Network. Let’s Network Then! — The Unlisted — Medium

Medium is the hottest writing platform right now, and you need to tap into it. Whether you're a marketer, entrepreneur, or startup founder, this book will show you how to maximize the reach and results of your stories. - The Ultimate Guide To Medium - Tell Stories That Millions May Read

Publishers may be able to get more value out of their tweets thanks to a new design change on Twitter... on the platform’s iOS or Android apps... stories will get some extra room, complete with lead art and the first few words of a story... part of the company’s plans for bringing more media into your home feed. - Twitter’s new article prev…

"@NASA is the 104th most popular Twitter account in the world... and 3.5 million on Instagram. The Department of the Interior, whose stunning wildlife and nature pictures make it the only government agency with cool visual content to rival NASA’s, has just 654,000 ... John Yembrick and Jason Townsend are veterans of other government agencies...…

The last couple of years has seen a revival of the Art of the eNewsletter. I have found myself paying much more attention to enewsletters in my Inbox... than to the marketing junk gushing from social media

"AOL's online dominance was such that building sites for the traditional web became secondary ... Companies fought over who had the best relationship with AOL, thereby allowing them access to audiences that their competitors didn't have.... If you're starting to think that 1995 AOL sounds a lot like 2015 Facebook, you'd be right. 20 years late…

"Our Analysis APIs analyze text or web pages, extracting metadata and classifying with topics (Functional Programming, Celebrity Gossip, or Hotels) and aspects (review, news, product, video). Analysis APIs can be used to label and organize content, recommend similar content or to build rich user profiles that enable personalization."

Great example of how to cover a social media trending topic via video: "A video featuring a beauty blogger with adult acne has been watched almost seven million times.... shows some of the comments that Em Ford received online after posting images of her face with and without make-up... she wanted to point out the "unrealistic expectations" soc…

The reasons are simple but powerful: you can’t control the communication. Despite it being a communication channel/social network (emphasis on network)/community (very debatable), it points into the other direction: filtering information, needing to pay for content to be seen, very distracting by other things like games, Ads (which used to be cont…