Real Words

As mentioned briefly yesterday in my blog carnival round up post, I have started a new blog called Diary of a Smart Chick. The purpose of the new blog is to serve as a place where I can compile information about my writing across all of the many different topic areas that interest me.

For a long time I have been trying to figure out the best way to keep an ongoing online record of all of my work. I write across so many different websites and topics that there’s never seemed to be a great way to do that. Although I’ve started using social networking sites like Twitter to let people know about blog and article updates, I haven’t found a good place to keep that information stored online.

In some ways, I’ve tried to do that from this blog. This blog is primarily about my experience as a web writer so it makes sense to use it to link to my writing around the web. However, I have always wanted this blog to be more about what it means to me to a be a writer each day than to serve as a showcase for my work. So I’ve tried to limit how much I link out to my other writing, especially writing that isn’t about writing and blogging and Web 2.0 issues.

I realized recently that I could create a whole blog devoted to the different topics that I cover regularly in my work. This coincided well with realizing that I wasn’t going to follow through on another project that I’d been toying around with for about six months. You see, Diary of a Smart Chick originally started as a website that was going to pull together news feeds from my twelve favorite topic areas. I was planning to discuss that news there and then allow for social networking about those topics on the site. But the logistics of doing that stopped making sense and I never finished creating the site. Now the site will serve the purpose of discussing those same twelve topic areas through the lens of my work around the web.

I hope that you’ll check it out as it develops. It’s only just launched so March is the trial period of beginning to post and discuss my work links. I’d love some feedback on what other writers think about blogs that are designed primarily for the purpose of compiling links to your web work in one place. How have other writes been doing this?