A new publishing platform from the minds of the co-creators of Twitter (News - Alert) is set to launch on a full-scale basis next year. Medium, the new enterprise of Ev Williams and Biz Stone, who took the world by storm with their first foray into websites, is only operational for a hundred or so people who are testing out the program. Medium will be used to feature and publish essays and stories written by users.

Of course, the number of users will not be so low for long. By the new year, said Williams and Stone, the site will be made available to the writing-inspired public and quickly adopted by would-be authors. Williams and Stone run Obvious Corporation together, and back a slew of new web sites including Branch—which is run by Josh Miller. Williams, Stone, and Miller, along with BuzzFeed head Jonah Peretti, sat down recently to discuss the changing landscape of publishing, the tech scene, and digital content. 


Image via Shutterstock.

What came of that discussion was that Williams and Stone plan to keep Medium at a higher quality than might be expected, though it may at times get tricky to do so. They’ll police the quality of the site somewhat by making users feel supported. The emphasis of all four men was the platforms are becoming a much more popular way of sharing content than lone websites. Curatorial sites like BuzzFeed and Pinterest are dominating instead of the blogs and sites that they draw from. 

Also, the men agreed that valuable web content can come from anywhere on the net. It isn’t just paid contributors and reporters who have important things to say, it’s also the everyday citizens who take to words once in a while to voice their opinions. Hopefully, Medium will be a place where good writing is published, regardless of who is doing the writing.

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