R.I.P. Medium - Don’t Plant Your Content Flag On Borrowed Land

I've been an early adopter. If you take the adopters curve, you'll see me at the forefront testing, trying things out. But some times things can be a wee bit weary.

Medium was one platform that I believed would be good as a replacement for WordPress. But I was wrong. Why? Because too much money is a bad thing. I've seen smaller dev teams release updates faster than Medium has done in two years. I guess many have given up on Medium, and that's because they really don't know where to place their bets or priorities.

And as much as I wanted it to succeed, I guess it's not worth trying to fix a sinking ship. So in short, I'll no longer be posting on Medium (unless they manage to resurrect like a phoenix from the ashes!)

I wondered why people enjoyed the simpler platforms. Of course, reducing the friction to publish is the key thing. But as you become more familiar with the platform you're on - you start to want more advanced features. And then you add plugins and all, to get the feature to work. And then it bloats, and then you want something simpler. Posterous, I really miss you!

Well, all said and done - the most important lesson is making sure you own your IP. I take the advice from Pam Slim on building your body of work. I did this over here at jpmartin.com - it's a collection of my thoughts, interests and occasional rants, over the last 15 years.

And I don't have to worry about someone from the editorial team policing me about what is politically correct, or wanting to be discovered because the SEO didn't work. As I look back, my only mistake was that I deleted a whole tonne of information, because I shifted my site to a third-party content management system provider. I haven't forgotten that lesson - digital sharecropping - don't plant your content flag on borrowed land. If you're old enough to remember, think about these names... Tripod, Angelfire, Geocities, LiveJournal, MySpace, Blogger, etc and most recently Posterous.

However, one of the things I am still struggling to figure out is how to produce more with the least possible amount of time. I am experimenting with video, even though it has poor SEO. I could get it transcribed, but that's not worth it if I'm giving it away for free!