Overview: Online Strategy

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

So many memories…

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…

The Art of Hosting is a highly effective way of harnessing the collective wisdom and self-organizing capacity of groups of any size.  ... a suite of powerful conversational processes to invite people to step in and take charge of the challenges facing them... better decision-making, more efficient and effective capacity building and greater abi…

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…

I’ve been extremely impressed with the false humility of a number of recent career transition stories on Medium. - Career Transitions: Crafting Your Medium Humble-Brag — The Coffeelicious — Medium

Atlas deepens our journalism by offering readers better access to the data and visualizations in so many of our stories. It also extends the reach of our journalism by letting you make use of our charts in new ways ... as we build out the platform, we are hoping to let anyone make charts in Atlas... Atlas gives each of our charts its own home, …

Why does one “experiment” (i.e., introducing a new product) fail to raise ethical concerns, whereas a true scientific experiment (i.e., introducing a variation of the product to determine the comparative safety or efficacy of the original) sets off ethical alarms? - Please, Corporations, Experiment on Us - The New York Times

I've broken down all of the major algorithm changes that have occurred over the past 2 years... - The Ultimate Guide to Facebook News Feed Changes... and How They Impact YOU!

The Coral Project aims to change how publishers, contributors and readers think about interacting in online communities ... to further opportunities for online engagement, extending beyond comments into conversations and contributor contributions... The goal of the open-source software is to enable publishers to better manage contributions and …

Clever. To build an app, Buzzfeed first built an enewsletter and tested that: "Designing and building an email newsletter takes a lot of work. But compared with launching a native app, a newsletter requires a much smaller investment of time and technology. As a lower-stakes product, we could launch it much more quickly than we could an app and …

Visualise your data and embed interactive, annotated graphs in your stories for free... At Journalism.co.uk we've been regularly using Datawrapper, Infogram and Google Sheets to name a few, and we have highlighted many others in our pieces. Plotly is perhaps one of the more complex resources, but it's free to use and enables its users to cre…

“not necessarily long-form, but definitely thoughtful, important, interesting, why not funny, content PLUS an interactive discussion” - Medium is a Network. Let’s Network Then! — Medium

So, it’s a network, I guess, built around longish form writing.... the company’s investment in its own publications is reportedly being trimmed, and structural changes are being made... War Is Boring – arguably one of the best investigative journalism site on war – is leaving Medium. Re:form – Medium’s design publication – has been closed ... T…

"Networks are pretty good for collisions. Bureaucracies are pretty bad for collisions." - Why I Write on Medium — The Message — Medium

While it most obviously appears to carry on in the tradition of blogs, it always seemed to me as something more nostalgic ...  an attempt to modernize early internet communities ... It is trickier to form a community like that on Medium now. Interface elements do not encourage discovery... We will know Medium is on to something when there ar…

Discover Publishing... was to serve two distinct purposes: - Help grow the Medium community. - Begin publishing e-books through Medium for those we represent. ... Think of Writing On as the community within the community of Medium.... Publishing On achieves our second of providing a platform to begin publishing talented authors who believe in…

"We’re very excited to announce the launch of a new feature for Publications. We’re calling it Letters. ... It’s a way of connecting with your followers and starting a conversation. It’s delivered to the inboxes of all your followers. It’s also a post, so it can be recommended, highlighted, built upon, and have a life of its own." - Introd…

Some really advanced techniques in handling trolls here - The Internet’s Most Trolled Cartoonist — The Nib — Medium

"A new interactive documentary, “The Fallen of World War II,” ... 18-minute film is styled like an infographic and that helps viewers fathom the scale of casualties in a way that simple numbers cannot.... The base elements it uses are simple human-shaped icons. Each of those represents one thousand deaths – and at some points in the video they …

From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities.