More meta blogroll pondering

skippy points to yet another good analysis of the whole blogroll kerfuffle, this one by Shadow of the Hegemon:

What Kos doesn't get is that he's a member of a community, not a leader of one. He (among others) have been seduced into to thinking that since their websites are sub-communities in their own right, they don't need to worry about the broader progressive community as a whole. Why worry about some guy with some random blog named "skippy" when you're creating this great big beautiful community? When you've got people falling all over themselves to provide content for your site in the form of those "diaries"?

Yet it is precisely that kind of community-building that the right seems to understand better nowadays. The point of blogroll linking is not merely creating a portable favorites list, but creating a shared community and shared sense of identity. If you share a link with someone, on some level you state "I am like them". Even when you link to conservatives, you inherently give them some degree of respect and shared identity; you state "yes, I think you're a putz, but I also think you're a peer. You can be both."

There's more.

Speaking of community, you know, big, beautiful, diverse, interdependent, mutually supportive networking on the net, I'd still like some help with that.

If you write diaries that you crosspost at Kos and elsewhere, then how about becoming a contributor to the Independent Bloggers' Alliance. Or if you don't want to do that, maybe you can add a link to it on your own blogroll. You can even use this pretty button in your sidebar.