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Now Twitter co-founder puts his money on Medium, a platform with much l-o-n-g-e-r posts

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By Noel Young, Correspondent

November 10, 2013 | 4 min read

Evan Williams, one of Twitter’s co-founders, is a 41-year-old Nebraskan who last week turned billionaire. And he has a big new communications idea : Medium.

Evan Williams: Longer is better?

Medium is a blogging platform, a place for people to write and read posts, the New York Times reports today.

Williams, as its C.E.O., hopes that it will allow thoughtful, longer-form writing to flourish.

“In the early days, I bought into the idea that the Internet would lead to a better world, that the truth was out there and that we didn’t need gatekeepers,” he said. The idea that he and many others embraced was that an unfiltered Internet would create a democratic information utopia. “Now,” he continued, “I think it’s more complicated than that.”

Medium is his idea of a gatekeeper, “albeit one that relies heavily on technology rather than human expertise or taste,” says the Times.

“ While it has some editors soliciting and promoting some content, the bigger idea is to use algorithms to help identify blog posts that readers consider valuable and to bubble them to the surface.”

Williams is not new to innovation. He sold his first big commercial venture, Blogger, to Google a decade ago, bringing in his first millions.

Many articles in Medium, for instance, are hundreds of characters longer than a tweet but tens of thousands fewer than something you’d find in, say, The New Yorker.

Williams said he was disturbed by the swelling cacophony of information that makes it easy to be overwhelmed and hard to know what to trust. Good information, he said, can lose out, and, as he described his new mission, “I want to give rationality a fighting chance.”

“I’m an eternal optimist,” told the Times, “But I’m a more realistic optimist than I used to be.”

The NYT points out, that Williams is not the only mogul seeking to use a technology-borne fortune to finance serious journalism, citing Jeff Bezos buying The Washington Post or Pierre Omidyar financing Glenn Greenwald in an investigative journalism venture.

The NYT adds, “But you have to give credit to Mr. Williams for having the courage of his convictions."

He’s backing Medium along with two business partners, Biz Stone and Jason Goldman, both formerly of Twitter. Medium, which started in 2012, has around 40 employees and, last month, started letting anyone write for it.

A few writers are paid, with their work solicited by a small editing team, but most are not.

The Times adds, "Much ballyhooed by Medium is software that allows “collaboration” among writers by letting them share posts privately before publication, in pursuit of suggestions or edits. Posts then appear in collections, or channels, like “Adventures in Consumer Technology,” or “Best Thing I Found Online Today.”

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