I've been seriously remiss with my blogroll lately. One of the things about using an RSS reader is that I don't use my own blogroll as a surfing point any longer. I add and subtract blogs in the reader, think "hey, I should update my blogroll" and then get distracted by something shiny.
I've finally taken a couple of minutes to make the blogroll actually match the blogs that I read. The list is a lot shorter than it used to be. The reasons why I trimmed blogs out are varied. Some had closed shop. Some had moved or modified and are there under their new guises. Some had changed considerably since I first started reading them and they just didn't peak my interest any longer. Some were just too profligate and I simply didn't have the time to invest in reading them any longer.
The saddest ones by far were the ones that were warped out of the zone of readability by politics. Blogs that I had picked up because they were informative and pointed became echo chambers of partisan rhetoric. Very, very harsh rhetoric. At a certain point I just couldn't read any more about how Bushitler is jackbooting all over the world or that Kerry was Sonny Bono reincarnate (only not as good looking and unable to carry a tune in a bucket with a Ziploc lid). I still followed those blogs for some time, judging by post titles whether I'd read the individual entries or not. Eventually it got to the point where I wasn't reading any of the posts so I removed the blogs from my aggregator.
Now my blogroll matches my actual blog reading and the horrible rent in space-time caused by that disparity is healing itself. When you don't get sucked into a parallel dimension tonight you can all thank me.
(I just realized that getting "sucked into a parallel dimension" could also be taken as a sexual metaphor, in which case it would be a very good thing and I hope it happens to you tonight.)
I hear you on this. My blogroll has never reflected more than a handful of what all I read so I don't have to purge it that often, but nevertheless there are those special cases.
It's saddest when the personal blogs do it. Because I'm not expecting it. I'm not expecting to be blasted out of the water with "and BY THE WAY if you voted for Bush you can EAT MY F----" or the equivalent. Um, thanks--could we go back to talking about your infertility issues some more now?
I was reading feministe the other day and she was saying how now all the knitting blogs were voicing political opinions, and how cool she thought that was*, and all I could think was, no, that is not cool, and boy am I glad I don't knit. Because for someone like me it would be terrible.
*I just wondered if she would have found it as cool if they were all voicing political opinions in favor of Bush. You know, I doubt it.
Whew! I made it the cut.
Er, I made the cut, too. No "it".
[checks blogroll, lets out sigh of relief]