(This was originally published here on LinkedIn)

If there’s one legacy I’ll leave to the internet (aside from a Twitter feed that sometimes reads like it should be scrawled in an asylum wall in crayon) is a long list of ideas that seemed great at the time but, for any of a variety of reasons, wound up being abandoned after a handful of attempts. This is both the great thing about having access to a publishing tool like a blog and, if you’re anything like me, something that can cause no end of regret over “what might have been.”

Over the years I’ve started probably 10-12 different editorial features on my personal blogs. Some of these lasted all of three installments and some like Movie Marketing Madness spanned the better part of a decade. And that’s not counting the freelance writing I’ve done.

A few years ago I made a rare good, rational decision: I went through the flotsam and brought it all under one roof on my personal WordPress blog. This was about the time I abandoned Movie Marketing Madness so it was a good time to do some cleaning of my online house. If you visit my personal blog and see the “Features” parent category you’ll see some with a couple dozen entries and some with just one or two. But it’s all there. It’s collected and, in a still very scattershot way, it makes sense. Sure, it shows some ideas I’ve abandoned, but they all make up who I am and who I’ve been online and that is important in lots of ways.

Experimentation is part of the web. Throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks. But, at least for me, it’s important to every now and again organize the junk drawer and, not necessarily throw things away but make sure there’s some logic in the chaos.

So what do you do with the ideas you start but then discard? Have they disappeared entirely or have you archived them in some way, shape or form? Do you find yourself revisiting them from time to time to see if they still hold interest for you?