The Nibble, Bite & Meal of Medium
I really like how Medium is evolving as a platform, particularly how they are re-imagining comments with Highlight, Comment & Respond.
As I mentioned earlier:
… I’m a big fan of how Medium has rebooted blog commenting, with line-by-line comments and a ‘respond by blog post’ feature, of which this is an example (actually, this is a response to a response to this post).
Recently, moreover, they added Highlighting to the mix:
With one simple swipe of the cursor, you can select a word, passage, or paragraph to highlight it…. The writer will be notified and receive a warm fuzzy. It’s a nice way to show them that you liked a particular part of the story. When your followers read the story, they will see your highlight, and your name will pop up above it.
For me, these three interactive features echo the ‘nibble, bite, meal’ content model, but in the other direction, from the reader back to the writer, and his/her wider community of readers:
- Highlight = give a Nibble: just select & click to say something about something, although noone (perhaps even you) will be quite sure why
- Comment = give a Bite: select, click and then type a few words — like a classical blog comment, but more selective
- Respond = offer a Meal: instead of a traditional comment that gets totally out of hand (or hits a character limit), hit ‘Respond’ and start typing. Bingo. You’ve just blogged, and your post is directly linked to the one that got you typing. Nice on-ramp for new bloggers, and some sort of replacement to Trackbacks, which I still lament.
However, as mentioned earlier, is does leave multi-person discussions in a bit of a limbo — it probably won’t be as easy to follow multiple responses to a post, let alone responses to the responses.
But then, comments, like blogging, are dying, right?