Blogroll Updated

King Parrot by Boron Homewood, from our Second Life Intentional Community’s art gallery.

It took about 30 hours’ work, but I finally got my blogroll updated, with 170 broken links fixed and defunct blogs eliminated, and 130 new blogs added. The resultant list of 302 blogs has been sorted into 38 categories, re-presented as my Blogroll and Online Reference Library, and moved from the main home page to a backup page. These are the people I go to first when I do research or look for inspiration on a particular topic.

In its place on the home page is an innovation that I call my Gravitational Community, which you’ll find in the right sidebar beneath my photo.  This is a list of the 70 people I have contacted most frequently in the past few months. Increasingly, I’m using IM, Skype, Second Life and other real-time conversational social networking tools to communicate, more than blogs, so there aren’t bloglinks for all of the people on the lists. 

I am sure there are some errors and omissions in the list, so please e-mail me with corrections. The Gravitational Community list will be updated more frequently than the full Blogroll.

I’m considering setting up FriendFeed links for these 70 people, so that my readers can see what they’re writing and posting far beyond just blogs (twitters, photos etc.) — You can set up phantom feeds for people even if they are not FriendFeed users. Ideally, of course, it would be great to have some way to set up impromptu ‘conversations’ using IM that could wrap in members of this Gravitational Community plus other readers who want to chat about a particular topic. Somehow, we need to make blogs more conversational.

Let me know what you think — I’m open to suggestions to make this more useful. And yes, Iknow my table of contents needs to be updated too. That’s next.