After Twitter got so many people blogging short, Medium means to lure us back to blogging long.

A NYT article about Evan Williams, a Twitter co-founder, whose new project, Medium, is a return to old-school blogging, which some of us never left.

Mr. Williams... says he’s reaching back to the once-du jour notion of blogging because, in the frenzy to build social communications tools, something has been left behind: rationality....

But there is something new: aggregating blog posts onto a main page like Twitter's:

He’s carrying out ideas he toyed with in his first big commercial venture, which was called, simply, Blogger. He sold that to Google a decade ago, begetting his first millions. 

I've always been on Blogger — so thanks to Williams for Blogger — and I already have a readership, but for someone starting blogging now or feeling ignored on Blogger, Medium might be a great choice, since it might drive readers to you and gives you access to a system that might work as a marketplace of ideas.

The algorithms that are designed to cut through the noise to the music worth hearing measure things like the items people read and recommend the most, Mr. Williams said. It then distributes those more widely to others who use the platform. The concept sounds like an amalgam of ideas already in practice — such as Facebook “likes,” or tools used to vote up stories at Reddit, or most-emailed lists. He describes it as a “holistic” model that brings together many tools, including some still in development....

By the way, Medium does look great, in part because there's none of the clutter of advertising (but that means there's no way to make money, and they're toying with charging for subscriptions).