http://www.bigoakinc.com/rankedhard/cutt-her-some-slack/

Refine the draft slightly if need be – group similar – publish as a Notebook category thought in process —

The point is after cutting away the fat I’m sure that there are elements within the posts that could help spark ideas for readers.

Just your revisiting some of them may spark completion.

I use the drafts as a notebook — jotting down the concept for later use

I would like to come here just to read your personal unofficial thoughts about Google and everything else. After all, you are a great online personality, always worth reading, so I wouldn’t mind coming here and read your “less than fortunate” thoughts, for even great professional writers publish regrettable texts from times to times.

This is one of the reasons I love wikis so much. On a wiki, it’s understood that the content is fluid and unfinished. On a wiki, one can place a tentative link to a subject matter, and not even return to it if one doesn’t feel like it. For your audience, just seeing that tentative link is useful information, it’s a suggestion for them to write on that subject matter (although I find, very few people will take me up on that offer to write something from scratch), it’s a marker for yourself, and it’s a marker for a page for which your audience can subscribe to if they’re significantly interested in it.

This is also one of the reasons I like Intuit (Quickbooks) also (although, obviously not everyone shares that opinion with me). Very early on, the online version of Quickbooks was missing some key features that were already included in the desktop version. One would just browse to the help page on that missing feature and just subscribe to it to get notified the next time it got updated. That’s it. I found that process very helpful. If I got stuck somewhere, I could just subscribe to that particular notification and then just forget about it.

Personally, I find that this way of dealing with changes mirrors much more closely our reality, and I think that’s a good sign. And obviously, you could tweak the sitemap, tweak the tags, and tweak the notification system so that it doesn’t notify people/doesn’t index/doesn’t publish on the front page/doesn’t publish in “recent changes” — unless there is a significant update on your part.

And just like in a wiki (or a presence app), you could have your drafts tag lead to the most “recent changes”, because in an environment like that — “recent changes” or “current status” — can become the most important pages regular readers pay attention to.

- Stephan

My personal opinion is to push the drafts live – with a highlighting note (like what we see in wiki) that says it is still a draft and needs some editing.

If you want, someone like me can help you to “edit & finish” the drafts with instructions from you over a phone – may be for a small fee;)?

-Sudha.

One question you should ask yourself though is how much time you have wasted writing those 219 drafts. Perhaps you need to apply a ‘Google’ like algo to you ideas before you start physically writing to determine if it’s good enough quality to actually get finished and posted. Waste less time that way and have more for doing your own thing or writing some good ‘Best practices’ posts.

For example I have been worrying about putting my Wordpress Blog posts into just one category cos I thought I would get Dupe penalties. One of your latest posts suggests that may well not be the case. We need more stuff like this Matt so come on, start filtering your ideas and get posting quality stuff instead of wasting time.

I guess the question needs to be asked why are they drafts? Are they drafts because you just have not put finishing touches on them or because the content is not up to par?

You probably should do a combination of posting some and deleting others. It would be very interesting to preserve the timing of the drafts and correlate with other items going on in your blog.

On an aside, I was just watching CNN and Microsoft just made a bid to buy Yahoo! for nearly 45 billion dollars, and yahoo stock just went way up, while google’s stock is going down. I have always used google, because it gave me the best results. However, one thing I can say is that I am 1000% sure that google often does not give stellar results, and my own website is a testimony to that.