Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time on Medium, the new writing and publishing platform created by people including Ev Williams, among others. I love it because the simplicity of the interface helps me focus on the actual process of writing and not get distracted with playing with fonts, styles, sizes, and such.
One of my goals for 2013 is to write more. The problem is that often times I think “I don’t know what to write about” even though I have a million ideas floating in my head. So, when I start to write a blog post, I’m often distracted with deciding about what to write about, changing that topic over and over, and then spending far too long making it all look “just so”. But, with Medium, even when I don’t know what to write about, I am instantly inspired with topics, or what they call collections. My favorite collection is “Products I Wish Existed” because I am always critiquing and thinking “why doesn’t x do y”.
Recently, I wrote a post on Medium called “I Want To Write On The Back Of My Photos“. The idea is that I think it’s really silly that there’s no way to attach a “note” to a photo, to take a photo and tap it so that it flips over and I can literally write a note on the back of it. As I said in my post:
I could think of a ton of other examples, but hopefully you see my point. It’s amazing that so many people have a camera in their pocket today. It’s changing the way we communicate and tell the stories of our lives, forever. But I think the simple feature of being able to add notes to photos could help us become much better storytellers.
It’s great to have that photo as a visual reference, but sometimes the photo doesn’t speak for itself.
Sometimes you need a short little note to capture details that the photo can’t do on it’s own.
Sometimes a photo is not worth a thousand words.
I’d love for you to have a read of the whole post over on Medium and let me know your thoughts.