In the old days there was the blogroll. The blogroll served several purposes. It was a list of links available to a circle of bloggers who read each others work, a navigational convenience for easy clickage from one blog to another. It was a reference list built to recommend sites to people who might not otherwise know about them. It was a search engine optimization (SEO) tool. There was a time when the more sites you linked and the more sites that linked to you, the better your blog appeared in search engine rankings.

Things, as they will, have changed. There might still be an SEO advantage in providing links and counting clicks, I imagine there is but it really doesn’t matter unless you want to get rich blogging. The only people who get rich blogging are… hell, NOBODY ever got rich blogging. So forget the SEO thing.

Those bloggers’ circles of mutual linkage still exist, but I think they represent a rather closed-end approach. Take my friend Ronni Bennett. Ronni writes Time Goes By which to me is the definitive online journal addressing the quotidian issues of aging.  I’m aging. Trust me. I’m aging. And a link to Ronni in the blogroll makes sense because I like her writing, I’m engaged by the topicality of Time Goes By, and she’s my friend. Still, I’m faced with the issue of creating a page layout here at Listics that people will find comprehensible, perhaps even appealing. I don’t have room in my sidebar for all the dozens and dozens of links that I find relevant and I would like to share with everyone.

So I’ve embarked on the process of cleaning up my link list, and sharing ten at a time in the sidebar under the heading “10 Random Links.” My link list is amazingly diverse. It contains techies and artists, journalists and foodies, activists and politicians and lions and tigers and bears. Well, okay. Maybe not so many of the zoo animals, but there are some really interesting people who will show up randomly in that sidebar. If a few dozen people find out that I’m blogging again, and if they visit regularly, I can promise an interesting experience if you click on those links! Now, I’m doing my best to tidy up, discard dead links, update addresses for people who may have blogged elsewhere way-back-when. You can help. If you find a dead link or something awful in that sidebar list, please give me shout and let me know. I’ll fix it.