“I need to chew a bit more on Distribution of Choice and Ecosystem of Networks …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…”