On Blogrolls and trusted domains and heresy

This is still a medium I’m learning about. Dylan Tweney’s comment, ostensibly after he noticed I blogrolled him, reminded me of something.

There’s something about blogrolls and trusted domains and avoidance of heresy, something I can’t quite put my finger on but it’s there.

Here are a few assertions I would love to see challenged, so I can learn:

  • When I visit someone’s blog for the first time, I tend to use the blogroll as a visual inspection aid, to try and see whether we have common philosophies and interests. Maybe there’s a product in waiting, one that shows how much your blogroll has in common with someone else’s, a sort of compatibility check
  • The way I get to someone’s blog for the first time tends to be on a trusted domain basis. I know and like person/blog X. That blog links to Y. I have never seen or heard of Y. So I must take a look, because I trust X.  Yes, I know it sounds like swivelchair StumbleUpon, but it worked for me before I ever saw StumbleUpon. Yes there are other ways, like when I search for something and truly stumble upon someone I have never heard of, or actually via StumbleUpon, but most of the time I go via someone else’s blogroll.
  • When I find someone on a trusted list that I have never heard of, I feel I’ve discovered gold. Somewhere deep inside me, I know I must keep extending that net and bringing fresh stuff in, otherwise I will be part of a heretical mutual admiration society where everyone agrees with everything and ideas decay very quickly. No learning can take place in such a context.
  • Since blogrolls won’t scale (we can’t have everyone listing hundreds of sites), there needs to be consolidation and perhaps even culling. We need to learn to concentrate on the different rather than the similar.

Just thoughts. So you see why I added you, Dylan.

Let me know what you think

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