Most bloggers maintain a blogroll of feeds they read regularly.

I suspect there’s a tendency to load up quickly on feeds related to one another, and then shift to a comfortable steady state in which few if any feeds are added or removed. I can see how this dynamic might tend to crystallize local networks of bloggers, linked to one another, very soon after they arrive on the scene. At the same time, the general insularity and inertia of blogrolls might act as a barrier to entry to useful new voices, who otherwise would be a great fit in the community. Trackbacks from new bloggers to established ones serve to some extent to erode this barrier, but trackbacks don’t propagate, and they also need to overcome the linked-to blogger’s limited attention.

John Holland would say something smart here about the trade-offs between exploration (adding new and better links) and exploitation (building ongoing conversations). I’m worried that exploitation is inbuilt in the socio-technical system.

So here’s an idea for a service, whether it be a website or a plugin.

Take my blogroll. Now spider each site, and compile a database of the blogrolls of all the sites thereon. Filter out all entries that already appear on my blogroll.

Sound like a referral service so far? Not quite….

First, I don’t want to cinch my little echo chamber tighter. So: Sort the database by the number of inbound links, and remove the top quartile. In other words, remove the most-linked-to blogs.

Second, I’m sure there’s a wide range of special interests I don’t share; I don’t knit, I don’t pray, I have no cat; I do read 19th-century magazines, I do care about automated mechanical design, and I long to understand TextMate enough to make it the basis of my laptop user experience… so let’s avoid the rarest of the rare. Very few care about all my quirks, and vice versa. Throw out the least-linked-to quartile, as well.

Call the remaining blogs the “penumbra” of my blogroll: Sites that have caught the attention of a few people on my blogroll, but not just one, and which I have not yet seen. The Goldilocks fraction.

And, thinking I should explore a bit more and exploit a bit less, I want to go see those sites. Hear what they have to say. And then maybe I’ll add them to my blogroll, and thus bump up their centrality.

If link-counting doesn’t work as expected, here’s one notion that might help: Give each database entry — each blog in the compiled list — a score calculated on the basis of a Technorati ranking. So big blogs and eeny weeny blogs linking to feeds would disappear, leaving the Long Tail middle to have its say.

I would like that. No time now. Make it work as a plugin in Wordpress, or make it a site I can send an OPML file to, and we’ll all benefit.