Doc invented the word blogrolling, but he doesn’t maintain a blogroll anymore. I have a page linked off the header of this blog that contains a huge list of links, but it doesn’t serve my purpose of a quick link out to a frequently read site. I can hear some people mumbling “Get with the program, Paynter. Use an aggregator and put these static methods behind you.” But the fact is that for me an embedded link is much more valuable than a subscription service. My “Blog Roll page” is no better than an aggregator, of course. In fact, it is clumsier to click through my blog to that list of links, locate the link I am looking for and then click through to that.
So I have promoted a handful of links to the right sidebar of the blog. It’s a WordPress widget that I’ll manually maintain and it represents people I read as regularly as possible, friends some of them, good reads all of them. It’s a convenience for me and I hope readers will find it valuable also. It should be one of those resources that provides the lateral connections that make the web a web, as Sheila Lennon said in a comment at Doc’s.
By the way, if you’re reading this and you look at that list and you wish you were on it, pop me an email. I did some conscious screening. Like I left my friend Dean Landsman off. Dean’s posting is intermittent enough that I don’t need a link in the sidebar for my own convenience. I can grab the link from my Blog Roll page when I need it, or — in this case — a new post may turn up for me in Google Reader before I wander by again looking to see if he’s completed the homework RB assigned him. Let me know where I erred by omission as I was crafting that short list. It’s easy enough to update.
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