More updates from Dave Winer: he has a blogroll on his home page again, and a new site blogroll.social. One interesting twist is that his blogroll sidebar is sorted by most recently updated blog. We’re going with manually ordered in Micro.blog, but I can see the value in automatic sorting too.

@manton Can't immediately understand the reason for live updating and sorting by activity. Maybe it'll come to me in time.

@SimonWoods blogger used to do this and it was great before I did RSS because one blog would be my key to check other blogs. And I knew “oh this one posted in the last 5 days I definitely haven’t seen that post”, for example. I’m not sure it works unless you’re using one blog as the main gateway to other related blogs.

@jsonbecker -- I agree. I like to know which are the freshest links. Also if you click on the wedge next to the name of a feed, you can see the five most recent posts from the feed.

@manton -- thanks for the links. so for anyone who's interested, thanks to interop, your blogroll from micro.blog can be viewed on our blogroll viewer. I created a special sub-domain for it. manton.blogroll.social

@manton Letting people influence the order like that is a bad move IMO.

Encourages people to update all the time, no matter the quality of the content.

@zorn Yeah, that was one of the reasons I avoided it. It could be gamed, whether intentionally or not. It's an interesting way to deal with a very long list, though.

@manton most recently updated, and including the date of that update, would be really cool feature.

@zorn - if someone does that i’ll take them off my list.

@rscottjones @zorn Like I said, maybe unintentionally. But I try to avoid algorithmic rankings and especially those that amplify existing popularity. Blogrolls are certainly minor but we gotta stick to our principles. 🙂

@hjalm That's a great point. It's likely there will be overlap between many blogrolls, no need for the same people to always be at the top.

@dave can’t wait to upload mine! Thanks for building this - so helpful for finding new bloggers.

@manton I'm asking myself here, as a meta-question, where are the youngsters that will make blogging cool again with new ideas? Rehashing the aughts may be great for nostalgia, it does little to make blogging appeal to the next generation, i.e. people with more time on their hands than sense in their heads, still curious about the future, what's up next.

@renevanbelzen I’ve wondered about that same thing. At the moment owning your own data seems lost on them.

@manton I really hope you don't start basing significant changes to your platform on someone who mostly came here to complain before leaving.

@gregmoore I'm not exactly sure who you're referring to, so I guess that's good. 🙂 I can't think of many significant changes we've made just because of complaints, unless we 100% agreed. I'm always trying to avoid accidentally creating consultingware.

@manton I was specifically referring to the interactions I experienced with Dave Winer's time on Micro.blog. If he was ever positive, I completely missed it. As for ranking by activity, it feels like feeding the worst impulses of social networking. If anything, I'd love more ways to bring more attention to people who post less often.

@gregmoore I think highlighting the less often is a pretty good goal for blogrolls. A blogger could specifically try to recommend bloggers who aren't getting enough attention. This is why my current recommendations list is in-progress... I threw in favorites like Daring Fireball and others but they don't really need a bunch of extra links. Could even have two blogrolls: "Favorites" and "Hidden Gems" or something like that.

@manton -- continuing thread -- hopefully we can agree that there are lots of ways to approach this, and tradeoffs between them. just like mail lists and blogs have different dynamics, and both are useful in different ways and different times. also these are early days -- a time i like to challenge my assumptions. some really good features we use to this day, and build on, came that way.

@dave Agreed. This is the right time to experiment. Also, the great thing about standards and interoperability is different platforms can disagree on the best UI and still be compatible. I think it's a good thing that Micro.blog and FeedLand (for example) have slightly different approaches.

@manton @gregmoore I like this idea of « hidden gems » blogroll. In the same vein, I also think the idea of referring blogs that are not getting enough exposure is reasoning with me because otherwise we often see the same blogs from one blogroll to another.

@manton I added recommended blogs on my design page for davidenzel.com but they don’t show up anywhere. I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong.

@manton @numericcitizen It's also great for reading. I've had a list in my RSS reader since the early 2000's for blogs that I love but post infrequently. It's like seeing an old friend when they reappear.

@manton -- now this is where I could really use a like button. (ducking)

@gregmoore @numericcitizen @manton The un-SEO list.

@jsonbecker Yeah I get it. I'm not inclined to use my site in that way, I guess, and wouldn't care much about anybody's list that had a bunch of well-known and high-traffic sites. Feels similar to some of the structural design that always made me wary of Twitter, though I suppose it all depends on individual use.

@manton Winer's pretty much UX I designed as OURSS.SOCIAL
Glad someone with technical expertise has implemented (tho I think he could use a more modern vibe).

So has M.b implemented an OPML displayer too, or just prompting folk to make a custom page?

@warner I haven't thought about displaying OPML on its own yet. How would that be used?