About Medium

What is this thing and how does it work?

Welcome to Medium

Medium is based on the belief that the sharing of ideas and experiences is what moves humanity forward. The Internet is the greatest idea-sharing tool ever imagined, but we’ve only scratched the surface of what it’s capable of. We’ve Come a Long Way In 1999, two friends and I launched Blogger (now part of Google), a simple tool for publishing to the web. Blogs (or “weblogs,” as everyone called them at the time) were largely unknown as a concept outside a small community of web geeks. And an idea that is now taken for granted—that anyone, anywhere could publish their thoughts to the global Internet audience—seemed like a radical notion. In the years since, the Internet has become central to how we live and work (even outside the Internet industry). We carry it around in our pockets on com…

Ev Williams

Medium Terms and More

Here’s some more Medium-based information on Medium. We have a collection dedicated to our terms and policies: Medium Policy. There, find our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and the Medium Rules. To learn more about Obvious and other things we’re up to, see The Obvious Collection. To see what the Medium office and team look like today, check out Launch Day.

Ev Williams

Writing in Medium

We’ve spent a bunch of time (and will spend much more) making the best in-browser editor on the web. Here is an overview of current functionality: WYSIWYG (Really) As I’m writing this, I see not just a WYSIWYG editor, I see the page I’m going to publish, which looks just like the version you’re reading. In fact, it is the version you’re reading. There’s no layer of abstraction. This is a simple (and old) concept, but I haven’t seen it in any other publishing tool—unless you count Google Docs and the like, where you’re basically always in editing mode (versus always in viewing mode). And it makes a big difference. Having to go back and forth between your creation tool and your creation is like sculpting by talking. There are those who would argue that when you’re writing, you’re creatin…

Ev Williams

What we’re trying to do with Medium

It’s been just over two months since we opened the curtain on the preview version of Medium. Since then, we’ve been kind of quiet (but busy). I thought it might be a good time to shed more light on what we’ve been up to—as well as what we hope to accomplish—with this little project. A Place for Ideas Let’s face it: There is plenty of media in the world already. And no matter what happens to traditional media economics, there’s nothing to stop the torrent of information rushing from smartphones, corporations, and new-fangled media startups onto the Internet, available for the world to see. While it continues to be more and more efficient to put media-type stuff out there, we think there are big improvements to be made in a particular type of media “stuff”: That which is not necessarily …

Ev Williams

How Medium Works

Medium is designed to allow people to choose the level of contribution they prefer. We know that most people, most of the time, will simply read and view content—and that’s great. If they choose, they can recommend* content to others, giving feedback to the creator and increasing the likelihood others will see it. Posting on Medium (not yet open to everyone) is elegant and easy, and you can do so without the burden of becoming a “blogger” or worrying about the arduous task of developing an audience. All posts are organized into “collections,” which are defined by a theme. (For example, this post is in the ‘About Medium’ collection.) Eventually, anyone will be able to create a collection about anything, and collections can be invite only (like this one) or open to contributions from anyon…

Luke Esterkyn

Medium’s director of content: Kate Lee

I’m happy to announce the addition of Kate Lee to Medium’s team. Kate has spent most of her career as a literary agent at ICM, discovering authors on the web (among other places) and helping get books published, from conception through production. The “publishing prodigy” and “wunderkind agent,” as the New York Observer put it, left her job in traditional publishing this April, in search of the future. She said at the time: “I thought long and hard about it…this wasn’t an easy decision to make, but it was the one I ultimately arrived at. I’m really looking forward to taking some time off and reading a book for pleasure.” We’re glad she’s done reading books for pleasure and will now spend time reading Medium posts (also pleasurable!). I was introduced to Kate this fall, via Obvious’s Ea…

Ev Williams

How Do I Post?

Note: Medium is in closed beta right now (everyone can read, but only some people can post). Posts on Medium are organized into ‘collections,’ which are defined by a theme. You can create new collections or contribute to existing ones. If you find a collection that you’d like to contribute to, you can do so by clicking the ‘New Post’ button in the upper right corner of the collection page (as seen in the Unforgettable Moments collection below): You can also create a new post from the homepage by clicking the ‘New Post’ button: You’ll then see a list of collections to which you can post. Select the collection you’d like to post to or create a new collection by clicking ‘Create a collection’: Note: Collections can either be ‘Open to Anyone’ or ‘Invite Only’. Collections that are…

Luke Esterkyn

All About Collections

All posts on Medium are organized into ‘collections’ which are defined by a theme. (For example, this post is in the ‘About Medium’ collection.) Eventually, anyone will be able to create a collection about anything, and collections can be invite only (like this one) or open to contributions from anyone. For example, here’s an open collection of crazy stories. Posts can also be cross-posted to multiple collections, which gives more opportunity for discovery and building one idea off of another. Collections give people context and structure to articulate their ideas. How To Browse Collections You can browse recommended collections on the homepage by clicking ‘Collections.’ You can also see what collections you or another user has created and contributed to on the profile page (medium.…

Luke Esterkyn

Cross-posting

We’re introducing a new feature today that we’re really excited about. The idea with collections is that they give people a context into which to publish their ideas. Optionally, the context could be shared, so that lots of people could contribute. But how do you decide what one collection your idea should be in—and how do you decide exactly the right way to frame the context? Obviously, there’s no one way to organize information. So now you can put any post in multiple places (collections) on Medium. How does it work? @Stirman originally posts ‘Barrel of a Gun’ to a collection called ‘This Happened to Me’ and later decides that it also works well in ‘Unforgettable Moments’ and he’d like it to show up there. He can now easily cross-post it to that collection by navigating to the…

Luke Esterkyn

FAQ

1. What Are We Trying To Do With Medium? Read this post from founder Ev Williams. 2. How does it work? Read this post. 3. How Do I Sign Up? To sign up, go to medium.com and click ‘Sign in with Twitter,’ enter your email address and verify your email address via the link we send you. We’ll keep you posted about great content, new features, and let you know when we open up to everyone. Anyone can sign up and read and recommend posts. 4. When Will I Be Able To Post To Medium? Medium is in closed beta right now (everyone can read, but only some people can post) and we don’t have a hard date set for opening it to everyone, but we will when we’re ready and we’re looking forward to it! We’re still working hard on the code and designing the product (a few users helps this process tremendously—…

Luke Esterkyn

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