Three-hit wonder | The Economist

From a brief Medium overview

"Mr Williams’s latest venture, Medium, which launched in 2012, is a clean, elegant-looking destination for essays, open letters and “big think” pieces. It is trying to become the central hub for writing by the public at large, as YouTube is for amateur videos. Journalists, business executives and heads of state, including Barack Obama, have all published on Medium. When Amazon disagreed with a New York Times article on the e-commerce giant’s apparently brutal work culture, a senior executive from the firm wrote a long retort on Medium. Small papers and digital-media firms, such as the Pacific Standard and The Ringer, are using it to publish content.

 As in Hollywood, it is easier to sell a sequel in Silicon Valley. In 1999 Mr Williams co-founded Blogger. The startup helped popularise the concept of blogging and the word itself by making it simple for people to post their musings without needing to code. After Google bought the company in 2003, Mr Williams worked on a podcasting firm called Odeo that ended up launching a text-messaging service, which became Twitter. “Anyone who has changed the world twice, I would bet on a third time,” says Jeff Jarvis, a professor of journalism at City University of New York."

Three-hit wonder | The Economist