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 19^th-​​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.