February 21, 2008
I will choose the brown spicy goo and dripping icing anyday. (OK, so this has NO-thing to do with the fate of American education, but so be it…)
I have a desperate, dare I say compulsive, need for transparent symmetry between my blogroll and my subscribed feeds. I also note carefully every diverse approach to blogrolling… and feel like all of them stink in one way or the other.
I’m not going to subject you to the gluttonous horror of a Carl Saganesque blogroll list (read: “billions and billions”) that only mean something in my little world. At the same time, having made it onto a couple of folks’ blogrolls recently, I am so deeply conscious of the honor that I feel like I have to take an all or nothing approach on my own site, to be fair. Had the same problem about fifteen years ago when constructing my wedding invitation list…
Overthinking? No one cares? Probably. But the roll’s coming down, in favor of a del.icio.us account, I think. Don’t cry, Argentina. You’re all in my heart. Or my Google Reader.
(How do you handle this?)
February 21st, 2008 at 9:04 pm
I came to the same conclusion some time ago, and dropped the blogroll from the sidebar. But I kept the tag cloud. Your blog has been there for a couple of months. It is fun to see your site on someone else’s list, isn’t it?
Unlike you, though. There is only an incidental correlation between my feeds and the tag cloud.
February 21st, 2008 at 9:16 pm
Yeah, I agree with Doug. The blogroll on the side of my blog still exists, but I really don’t care about it. I’d much rather have a tag cloud, but these all seem superficial at this point. In the end, none of this really matters.
And now, back to wine.
February 21st, 2008 at 9:17 pm
AW. Thanks, Doug. This is exactly the crazy sense of honor I mean. Love your stuff and In Practice. Tag clouds haven’t grabbed me yet. They seem…disorganized. But I am German, so I think my reaction is genetic.
@Joe: Oh, yes, without a doubt– meaningless. Darfur, etc. But this sort of tinkering on an education-related project is relaxing to me, in a “well, I’m *kind of* saving the world” way.
February 23rd, 2008 at 2:03 pm
I can empathize with you, but ultimately I use the blogroll as I think was originally intended (or at least what I would have intended if I invented it). Every link on my blogroll is to a blog that I will be regularly reading for the foreseeable future. There are many more blogs in my reader than on the blogroll because either a) they are irrelevant to the subject of my blog or b) I haven’t made up my mind about them. As a ruthless feed pruner, I’ve found that that solution works best for me. I wouldn’t expect anyone to include me on their blogroll if they didn’t follow my blog.
February 24th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
Hi Dina —
I’m glad that I got on your blogroll early:-)
Seriously, you have to pick and choose. I actually have not updated my in a while because I read my feeds in Google reader and my blog is still pointing to Bloglines. Soon, it will be updated. I feel that way with twitter followers, but in the end, you can only read so much, and there’s that job and life around us as well right?
Keep on writing!