I'm increasingly convinced that the natural affinity principle I mused about earlier this week will be a major force in helping people manage the infoglut associated with the expanding "blogosphere."
Today's example. Jill Walker linked to an interesting blog called texturl. Read through a few entries, and found that the author, Brandon Barr, (a) lives here in Rochester, and (b) attended a symposium on 'language and encoding' today in Buffalo that my mother also attended (and that I wanted to attend). [added later: can't trackback without a link to a specific post, it seems. here it is.]
So yeah, texturl's on my blogroll now. Was probably only a matter of time before I circled around to it.
For no particular reason, I've settled on 25 as about the limit for what I can put on the list. Am finding it not too difficult to jettison some to accomplish this, however. At least not yet.
<addition time="a few minutes later" context="while surfing links that seem to interconnect the nodes I'm interested in">
My first sense of blog interconnections and "circles" was that they were likely to be relatively static and impermeable. My initial experiences seem to indicate more permeability than I had suspected...I ended up linking to, and then being linked from, many of the people whose writing I most enjoyed. Hrmmm. What to think? Open? Closed? Permeable? Impermeable? Unpredictable? Inevitable? Still too early to say, I think.
</addition>
I've found that blog clusters do shift. At least, the blogs I read regularly shift, quite slowly. I have a few stable blogs I've read "always", but others sort of come close to my interests and then we diverge. It always feels a bit strange to remove those ex-reads from my blogroll, and if I've had good blog conversations with them I often leave them there for a good while after I really stop reading them because it just feels so rude to take them off.
I think I find new blogs I want to read regularly several times a month - some of them always sort of fade out though, or turn out not to post much or whatever. And then there are all the blogs I only read a post of when someone links to it, but I find some of those I come back to through links from other people...
- so my circle of who I read is definitely permeable.
I don't know how many blogs I really read regularly. I guess there'd have to be several layers - the dailies, the weeklies, the occasionallies...
Btw, have a look at Mark Bernstein's artifical life experiments with simulated weblogs and how, if you set them to follow simple rules (like read X of your neighbours at random, stop reading and choose another at random if their topic is very different from yours and continue if it's close to yours - pretty realistic, I expect) - following these rules for a few cycles, they'll cluster. He also does stuff where the blogs are unhappy with few like-minded friends and happy and productive with more - after going through some cycles, almost everybody ends up in a cluster and happy :)
Rereading it, there are HEAPS of good points here - also relating to how secondary interests help combat that dystopia of right wing bloggers only reading other right wing bloggers and being blind to anything else.
http://www.markbernstein.org/alife2.html