Now that I’m really high I finally understand Medium.

35,000 Feet in the air and I finally get it.

Maybe it was drinking the coffee at Caffe Centro in the park where Twitter was hatched.

Maybe it was Ev’s recent post talking about how Medium is not a publishing tool.

Maybe it was attending the Neo4J event at Medium HQ where Nat walked us through how they programmatically recommends stories.

I’m not entirely sure how this serendipitous series of events finally made the lightbulb go off, but it did, and I finally “get” Medium.

Initially my reaction to Medium was that it was a really pretty blog engine that didn’t let me use a custom domain name. I couldn’t quite understand what the benefit of switching over from Tumblr might be.

My blog on Tumblr has a (not accidentally) Mediumesque theme. I have disqus comments plugged in so that people can argue with and high-five my posts. I even wrote some custom javascript functions to embed tweets on my blog the same way that Medium does. So I found myself staring at my blog and thinking “This looks great, it loads fast, it has all the functionality that Medium has, why should I bother to move?”.

So here I am, hurtling through the air at 550 MPH half between San Francisco, my favorite place in the world to go spend another week in Dallas with my favorite people in the world. Crappy gogo wireless paid for, I read some of 500ish words by M.G. Siegler and highlighted an interesting line, I left a comment.

That was it. The lightbulb. I left a comment inline beside a particular line that I felt was insightful.

In that comment were other comments. I clicked on the authors. I discovered some other interesting people who were thinking interesting thoughts about interesting topics.

I realized at that moment that Medium is not about the act of writing. Medium is about the act of participating in a dialogue around the writing. Although Ev wrote that, experiencing it is different than reading a how-to manual.

Writing starts the conversation, but by engaging in a dialogue, we self select a community of people who have interesting thoughts about very specific sections of the written word that we are personally interested in discussing. In short, we pick new friends.

Cool beans. Thanks Ev.