The Trouble with Blogrolls

The Aardvark Speaks, in What blogrolls are about, gets into the tricky issue of trying to balance the careful selecting and pruning of links to other blogs with the tendency bloggers have to over-identify and emotionalise their relationship with their blog. If you remove someone from your blogroll, it doesn't mean they're not your friend anymore, he protests (and yet he knows as we all do that almost everyone will still take it that way.) This is just one aspect of the fascinating new social phenomena that spring up with each new manifestation of "virtual life", as the world-wide web matures.