The role of a blogroll: community network or chosen few?*

Lately I've been having a bit of a think about the blogroll over there in the sidebar. When I started this blog, I decided I wanted to keep my blogroll nice and short. I had seen blogrolls that seem to list everyone the blogger had ever read, and I found it a bit intimidating. If I am looking for new blogs to try out, I tend to use links from blogs that have a short blogroll, because (a) I can skim through it easily and pick the one or two links that sound best, and (b) I assume that these are the "best of the bunch" in that person's view, and so the chance of getting something I really like through this random link-clicking method is much higher than it would be if I picked something from a blogroll of hundreds.

Recently, though, I have found myself wanting to expand my blogroll. A lot. I've had quite a few new commentators lately as well as a whole heap of people linking to me, and in many cases I want to link to their blogs, while in other cases I feel I "should". It's only fair, right? But even now that would probably make my blogroll twice the length it already is, and if I get linked to by more people in the future, it will only keep growing, until I can see myself ending up with a blogroll of the sort of length I was trying to avoid.

So I started thinking about the purpose(s) of a blogroll, and I realised that for me, at least, there are two. First, it's obviously for recommending blogs that I think are the absolute best I have come across. And secondly it serves to connect me to my sector of the blogosphere. It says "these are the people I hang out with" in the sense that I read their blogs, they read mine, and we comment at each other. And that is helpful for the reader too, since it tells them to an extent what sort of blog to expect mine to be: who is influencing me, who my audience is, who I might be referring to.

And the problem is that the set of blogs on my blogroll for the first purpose doesn't always overlap with the blogs that are there for the second. There is no sense in which I "hang out" with Dooce, for example. I read and worship her blog, but she's never likely to visit mine, and her readership is so diverse that me reading her blog doesn't define me as part of any specific community. Many of my commentators here (can I say "many", when I only have ten or so?) have excellent blogs that I do want to recommend to other people. But although it hasn't actually happened yet, there's always the chance that I'll get a regular commentator and reader whose blog I really dislike, and don't want people to think I am endorsing. But if they really did read and comment here regularly, I would want to link to them as a way of saying, "Here's someone who helps define my blog".

Maybe you can see where I'm going with this. I'm thinking about having two blogrolls: one for "blogs I want to be when I grow up", and the other for "people I like to hang out with". The only thing is, I don't want people to think they are on the "people I like to hang out with" blogroll because I don't like their blogs and am not recommending them. Rather, they are there because I feel like I am in some sort of community relationship with them, whether that is because I hang out at their blog a lot, or they hang out at mine. I am still recommending their blog, but with qualifications: "If you are into the sorts of blog that make up this sector of the blogosphere, then here's one that resonates with me that you might want to take a look at."

So in short, I don't want to offend anyone, but I do want to go back to having at least one list of links that was what I originally envisaged my blogroll as being: a short list of the absolute best blogs I have come across on the web that may or may not have anything in common with mine, but that I highly recommend to any visitor, no matter what online community (s)he identifies with.

Any feedback would be appreciated.

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* I've spent so much time lately devising thesis chapter titles that I am now incapable of coming up with anything that doesn't involve a colon, a question mark, and/or an attempted pun.