Why I Have This Site

Jonathan Poritsky wrote Medium Confusion over at The Candler Blog. It is a good read about Medium and what it might be in the future (or the present or … eh … whatever). Go ahead and read it before going on because I’m going to focus on just a small portion of the entire post because I agree with it entirely.

Here is one of the money quotes for me:

The paid writers bring their clout to Medium, the platform, in order to convince unwitting writers that they should contribute to Medium, the magazine, for free. The paid authors are thus pied pipers of a sort, luring not the readers but the writers out of the web and into Medium.

This has been something I have missed as the web has continued to be splintered into smaller and smaller little fiefdoms. It might be because I have the ability to stand up my own WordPress installation (which you are on) and fool around with programming enough to really hurt myself, but you see it happening more and more by people posting their thoughts to Facebook-only, or Google+-only, or Medium … it is all the same. It locks the information up behind something else. Sure, it might just be a free login, but will it always be that way?

I have this site not because I want fame, but because I want to have my own place to write and “call my own”. I dabbled with Tumblr for a little while, but the idea of being able to control my own content and not need to worry about whether it would meet the standards of someone else is refreshing.

It is also a single place where you can find out what I am doing. If you happen to read something I wrote about Novell you might also find out that I am into Nintendo, or web design, or agriculture, or … you get the idea.

It feels like we are losing that.