Outbound Communication Channel Overload

[mikeal]

We have a bit of a problem. Right now, we have a one-to-one relationship between project identities and our outbound communication channels.

Our existing top level project identities are:

• IPFS
• libp2p
• IPLD
• multiformats
• Filecoin

We also have new projects that may soon graduate to a top level identity like PeerPad and ProtoSchool.

There are good reasons that we keep these identities separate and I'm not suggesting that we stop keeping them separate. However, as we develop our outbound communication channels (Blogs, Twitter, YouTube, etc) it's prohibitively expensive to always be splitting our audience and subscriber base.

My recommended fix is to create "The Publication" (real name TBD) which is a new identity that we can use to encompass all of this ecosystem. We can use this for a Blog or Medium Publication, twitter account, YouTube channel, etc. This would allow us to build a unified subscriber base without sacrificing any project identities.

We could even consider using this to brand events that are broader in scope that our project specific events.

We'd continue to manage independent twitter accounts that would tweet about any new posts and other content relevant to that identity. Obviously, other project identity assets like websites would remain unchanged.

Thoughts?

What do people think this publication should be called?

[mikeal]

Working title for this publication is "The Protocol."

I'm currently evaluating Ghost Blog. https://ghost.org/

[meiqimichelle]

💯to this -- a consolidated communications channel is definitely needed, and I like your idea to call it "The Protocol". What would be subtitle be? (I'm guessing we'll need to explain what we're doing, no matter what we call it, and with a strong subtitle we can call it whatever the heck we want, ha).

Re: platform, I've heard Ghost Blog is nice, though I have never tried writing on it. I've also not tried customizing designs on Ghost, though we can do a lot with just a clean default design and the ability to customize the header/logo, so I'm not overly concerned. (I'm thinking of all the companies that use Medium as a blogging platform.) If you like, create an issue in the internal Protocol design repo with whatever details necessary for the design team to take a look.

At some point in the (hopefully near) future, we will take another look at all our user-facing properties and see what language or design might be adjusted so our message is clear and accurate. Since that hasn't started yet, from my perspective the most important features for a blog platform decision today are:

• the platform should store and export our data/metadata in useful ways so we can transfer it later, if needed
• the platform should be relatively straightforward for our team to work with so we actually use it ;)

[mikeal]

What would be subtitle be?

We can bike shed on this messaging for a while, but I think we should call out decentralization. The one scope that I'd like to make clear is decentralization.

the platform should store and export our data/metadata in useful ways so we can transfer it later, if needed

Yup, Ghost is great about that, and this was one of the big reasons I didn't want to go with Medium. Ghost just uses markdown, so we won't lose any formatting on export like we would with custom formats like Medium.

the platform should be relatively straightforward for our team to work with so we actually use it ;)

Yup, Ghost is great about that, and this is why we're not using "crazy code that Mikeal wrote in a weekend that turns markdown files on GitHub into a blog" :)

[terichadbourne]

@mikeal Could you say more about any specific concerns you have with Medium?

I agree that the ability to access stats is limited, but I feel really strongly that discoverability is important here, and Medium very much counts as "meeting them where they are." I read articles every day that I never otherwise would have seen because they surfaced themselves in my inbox based on my interests. There's absolutely no company blog that I make an effort to visit independently. If people are interested in related tech but haven't heard of PL or our various projects, how would they be introduced to our blog if were hosted with Ghost?

Medium is incredibly straightforward to work with, very easy to use with external contributors, and has customization options for headers / logos (per @meiqimichelle's note) and tabs. I've loved it for the Offline Camp Medium pub.

I like the idea of having a consolidated blog that can share updates related to various projects, using some form of tags / categories / pages to enable people to see only what interests them. (Feel free to check out the "tabs" on the Offline Camp pub for how I've accomplished this within Medium. I control the specific inclusion of articles and the layout there, moving whatever I'd like to the top of the page.)

[mikeal]

For some background, Medium has made some relatively arbitrary decisions to remove publications in the blockchain space. https://blog.status.im/status-medium-and-censorship-2aef5921b173

Medium is unparalleled at discoverability, and great to use, I won't argue with that. However, portability is a bit of an issue (posts are in a custom format that are hard to get out) and so if we did use Medium and in the future wanted to move, for any reason including being arbitrarily removed, we'd have a hard time.

If it were just the portability issue or just the potential blocking issue I'd be willing to punt all of this and say "we'll deal with those problems when they come" but when you put them together our "Plan B" options are quite limited.

[erlend-sh]

I like the Baremetrics approach, using Medium as a syndicate service.

https://baremetrics.com/blog/medium-back-to-blog

Republishing new content to Medium

Going forward, we are still going to publish to Medium, but with two big caveats.

1. We’ll publish new content two weeks later to Medium (so the initial publishing of the content is able to get solidified as the primary source from an SEO standpoint).
2. We’ll use Medium’s Import tool to publish the content. Medium buries this thing, but what it does is lets us republish on Medium and have them set the canonical URL to the original post on your own website. That’s a big kick from the SEO side of things as it tells Google that your original post is the main one and should be given preference in search results.

With this method we still own the original content, get the benefits of being the primary source and get the distribution benefits of Medium!

By making ourselves the original, authoritative source, we’re able to control the whole experience for the long term and to our benefit instead of potential short term wins to Medium’s benefit.

[mikeal]

Update: I've mentioned our concerns to Marvin in PL legal and he thinks he might be able to alleviate our concerns with Medium.

[terichadbourne]

Please note that I've opened an issue in protocol/community to solicit feedback on the audience teams across Protocol Labs would like to reach and the content they'd like to use to reach them. See https://github.com/protocol/community/issues/4