Sunday, January 30, 2011

The Writer's Knowledge Base

When it comes to search engines, Google is pretty much the king for most people. They are, after all, the 800 pound gorilla of online searching.

But for specialized search results, say for writers, Google does not always provide useful, relevant or meaningful results. That's where the Writer's Knowledge Base steps in.

The Writer's Knowledge Base is the brainchild of mystery writer Elizabeth Spann Craig and software engineer Mike Fleming. Elizabeth had begun collecting a massive amount of writing tips, writing articles, writing blogs and anything else she could locate on the Internet that addressed subjects that were pertinent to writers. She would share these links in her own blog and in her Tweets, but she worried that the information was not readily available unless a reader, like her, amassed a huge amount of bookmarks for later perusal.

Elizabeth wondered aloud on her blog if there wasn't some better way to make this writer specific information available and that's where Mike Fleming entered the picture. Mike created a searchable collection of Elizabeth's ever-growing writing links and thus The Writer's Knowledge Base was born. WKB, as Mike states on his own blog, is especially helpful in being writer-centric because...

"The search is done instantly over thousands of writing-related articles ranging from character development to author promotion on social media. Unlike Google, all of the results are relevant to you as a writer. They may not all interest you, of course, but at least searching for "plot" will bring back articles on how to plot your story and not news articles on terrorist plots."

I did a few cursory searches for myself and found the links and information to be extremely relevant, informative and helpful. I'm excited that Elizabeth and Mike have put this resource out there for writers to make use of in our daily writing work and I've placed a box link to WKB on my sidebar to make it easier for visitors here to access.

Give it a look and see what you think.
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