phil ringnalda

I need to chew a bit more on Distribution of Choice and Ecosystem of Networks, and maybe get a copy of Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (yeah, I’m a bit behind in my dead tree reading), but it feels to me like there’s something useful in Ross’ discussion of “the strength of 12”, the average number of people with whom you can have a strong relationship (or, that you are willing to be alerted by IM of their every weblog post), and “the magic number 150”, the number of people with whom you can manage a social relationship (or, the number of RSS feeds that you can keep up with).

I’ve been wondering for quite a while now how to rethink how I do a blogroll, and what feels best to me sounds a lot like that: a fairly short list of my tribe, people whose every word I read as soon as I know it’s published, and I’ll assume you’ve read too, and then a longer (much much longer, probably) but less prominent list of “barbarians with whom we can sometimes trade,” people whose feed I read, or whose page I visit fairly regularly, and whom I need to post about more often, because I know damn well you aren’t clicking on them in my blogroll.

Paradoxical as it sounds, I think there’s a need for “people I’m so close to that I don’t post about them much.” While I thought that Mark’s Clippy was hilarious, and pointed it out to several people at work, I can’t imagine having any readers who don’t also read Mark, so while a link-and-indepth-comment within the tribe is what actually makes it a tribe, and microcontent votes are what shows the rest of the world what a sharp tribe we are, I just can’t imagine that you need me to link to every single post Simon makes when I don’t have anything more to say than “Simon says…”.

But the inevitable but, I’m not sure how someone like me, completely lacking in the social graces, gets from here to there without angering too many people. I see people doing public delinking ceremonies, or sulking when someone delists them, but I don’t get it. I write what I want to write, and if someone links to me I assume it’s because either she wants to read it, or she thinks that people who read her will also want to read it, and if she decides to pull her link, then either she changed her mind or I changed my writing. The last thing I would want is for someone to link to me, or worse yet read me, out of a sense of obligation. WIJAGH.