Obvious Corp., the startup incubator that Evan Williams and Biz Stone put together after they left Twitter, launched an ambitious new effort on Tuesday called Medium — a lightweight publishing platform the company says is part of an attempt to rethink how (and presumably also why) we publish content on the web in an age of what our own Om Malik has called democratized distribution. The two previous offerings from Williams and Stone took aim at a similar goal: Blogger was one of the first blogging platforms, and Twitter was the first network to capitalize on the concept of real-time stream-based publishing, or what some like to call microblogging. Is Medium going to be as revolutionary? That seems unlikely — but it’s still interesting.
Williams says in his introductory blog post that Medium represents only “a sliver” of what he and his team have learned about publishing and how it needs to be reinvented. As he notes, the idea that anyone could publish their thoughts for free from anywhere and have people read them was seen as revolutionary when Blogger first started in 1999, but now that ability is taken for granted. So what comes next? Williams suggests in his post that collaboration and the crowdsourcing of quality content are two of the core principles that Medium is based on. As he puts it:
“Lots of services have successfully lowered the bar for sharing information, but there’s been less progress toward raising the quality of what’s produced. While it’s great that you can be a one-person media company, it’d be even better if there were more ways you could work with others.”
Read the rest at gigaom