‘Obvious’, the company headed by Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Ev Williams, have introduced a new collaborative publishing tool called Medium.

The release follows the pair’s continued success in providing the world with major publishing platforms, beginning with the Blogger service and, more notably, Twitter. Medium aims to offer a collaborative resource among media networks and maintain the standard of content production.

Co-founder Williams writes, “Lots of services have successfully lowered the bar for sharing information, but there’s been less progress toward raising the quality of what’s produced. While it’s great that you can be a one-person media company, it’d be even better if there were more ways you could work with others.”

Medium features different types of posts including text and pictures, which are then grouped into collections. From there, multiple parties can add materials to these groups, as part of a ‘networked publishing’ operation.

The category groupings are organised with highest-rating posts at the top and the rest appearing below. As of today, people can access Medium and offer commentary such as ‘This is good,’ ‘This is helpful’ and ‘Nice work!’, all of  which contribute to the site’s scoring system. Currently, only a limited number of users are able to publish new content on the site.

Stone emphasises that while Medium’s primary objective is to facilitate a global networked publishing system, the site is still in production.

“Much of our vision for Medium is just that – vision,” Stone writes. “Our ideas are much farther along than our product. Medium is only a sliver of what it could be.

If Obvious’ product history is anything to go by, Medium is set to create a significant impact in the social network and online publishing industries.

Story originally published on Marketing‘s sister site Macworld.