True story. The guy who invited Medium is a Swedish programmer named Bengt Bengtman. Unfortunately, he got sick before he could finish the algorithm that would be able to judge and compensate writers based on the strength of their work and not their social media skills.

On his death bed, his American partners came to him as asked him “but Bengt, what will we use to judge the value of all the stories published on the platform?”

He replied “critters,” but with his heavy Swedish accent it sounded like “kuh-rate-us,” and no one was sure.

Management was torn between “critters,” “creators,” and “curators.”

Give the drive toward profitability, they dropped the far more expensive method of hiring true creators to judge the value of everyone’s writing, and decided that the curators should be critters, hence the evolution of the Corgi method.

True story.

You know, doing improv in response to other people’s work is one of my favorite things to do on Medium, as you could probably tell based on my constant repartee with Gutbloom

I have co-written/compiled/edited two “books” out of this process.

One is unfinished but lives on as a publication created during the furor over the Hunger Games. It started as a bizarre dream that Michele Stone posted and I loved it some much, I corralled some of Medium’s best humorists to contribute short 200 word posts and their inability to follow simple directions led to disastrous but I thought hilarious results. The result was The Grammar Games.

The second collaborative piece was a more philosophical work that was based on the mind blowing quote of Victoria Easterday, who responded to one of my posts, “I am the air around the hole of the donut.”

My efforts to track down every strange and humorous quote on Medium led to the The Tao of Blogging, which has sold an astounding 0 copies on Amazon. Tell me people wouldn’t want to read a book with this description:

Unlike any inspirational or daily affirmation book, The Tao of Blogging dares to ask the BIG questions about life, love and death that no one else would touch, such as, “Does this urn make my butt look big?”

In any event, it has been three years since I did a collaborative story. Would you be interested in starting something? I have no idea about the form, but I’m sure I could bug a few of the humorists on Medium to put forth a less than Herculean effort and see where it goes from there.