blogging, 2015 style

So, after eons of dithering, I decided to give Social Media a try.  

Apparently blogs are completely last decade and out of fashion, which makes this post distinctively anachronistic.  Also, apparently, as of October 2015, the two hottest place to publish your thought leadership pieces are Medium and LinkedIn. Yes, the social platform for professionals and job seekers is diversifying into user-created content in a bid to make the 2-sided platform more attractive to social influencers, sales people and recruiters by retaining the eyeballs and attention of the salaried office worker who hangs around LinkedIn because surfing LinkedIn is one of the few accepted forms of loafing that can be legitimately classified as work. Both these platforms come with pre-installed reader bases, and so can help newbie thought leadership writers circumvent the first barrier to continued-writing: that of eyeballs.  

Also, apparently, according to third party interpretation of the TOCs, content posted on these platforms are no longer quite exactly your asset.  But that's, in most cases, okay since the published content is meant viewed by strangers anyway. And who knows what strangers do.

What's the subjective difference between these two platforms?

After pocking around the services a bit, my conclusion is that 

1. Medium has better publishing user-experience (UX)
2. Medium has better reading UX. It is more suitable for (on the demand side) readers who like reading long posts and (on the supply side) writers afflicted with logorrhoea. LinkedIn is better for short snippets of information since business people have attention spans of the this-meeting-is-really-boring-let's-see-how-I-can-entertain-myself-by-glancing-surreptitiously-at-the-mobile-phone type.
3. Content wise, Medium is more lifestyle-orientated while LinkedIn is (unsurprisingly) more business-centric.

Given the nature of the drivel that I wanted to post, Medium provides a better fit.

What about other platforms?

I took one look at Facebook's Notes function on the desktop browser and promptly closed the tab.  After being conditioned to the mobile version of FB, the desktop UX is visually a world of pain.

For clarification: the publishing functionality on both Medium and LinkedIn are limited on the mobile platform, hence the default to the desktop. 

Unrelated side note: whoever said the mobile has totally and utterly killed the desktop or laptop obviously hadn't built powerpoint decks (as reports) or complicated excel models. 

No, Reddit doesn't count.

Experiment setup

1. Wrote an article and stuck it on Medium. Link here: http://bit.ly/1XwphPd The use of bit.ly is also an experiment, bit.ly being the 140-character-Tweet-enabler service that shortens long links.
2. Stuck the shortened link on Twitter, commenting & hash-tagging appropriately.
3. Shared the article on LinkedIn via a post (not a repost!), using the full link for variety's sake.

Observation so far

Sufficient observation has been given to UX.

What about eyeballs? Given the extreme drivel-class of the content, I expect extremely viscous diffusion to the links.  On verra! 

New Words to add to your vocabulary

I found three new words to add to the "Little Vocabulary Book" in one article of the venerable and authoritative Economist.

They are

febrile

assiduous

dirigiste

Call me daft, but what an adventure of discovery when I can do a "Google>define: *" search on the trusty mobile phone and get a near instantaneous definition while sitting in a cafe enjoying the good read.

Doomsday vault for your greens and carbo

A bit of a sensationalised name, perhaps, but the Svalbard International Seed Vault intends to serve as a cryogenic storage for the world's agricultural crop diversity: seeds! I love the idea of this seed vault built to last against anything we humans can throw at the environment - very practical AND beautiful.

What about proteins though? Meat sources are going to much, much harder to preserve. Cloning runs the risk of destroyed labs, perpetually reproducing 'stock' animals are no better than your normal farm.... under an ice mountain. Tough question. Perhaps we might all become vegetarians, since all essential amino acids can be found from plant sources.