Other bloggers have been very kind to me for the past 10 days, giving feedback and offering suggestions. One of these suggestions, passed along by the estimable Mr. Snitch, was that I really need to put some thought into my blogroll.

I started this job yesterday, tinkering with my WordPress Themes code again so that my post categories list would display below my external links. At some point I am going to create a list of Rochester blogs, too (an idea I lifted from Mr. S, who has a Hoboken category :-)). So if you blog and are from my neck of the woods, be sure to leave a comment somewhere so I don’t miss you. (I ought to have done it while I was putting together my fast ferry post but I didn’t. Oh, well.)

That, however, will be the easy part. I am far from figuring out who else I should blogroll, because until this morning I hadn’t articulated to myself why I should choose any blog in particular.

Then I went back and read a few more posts from A Memorable Fancy, a blog I discovered last night (whose writer was kind enough to comment here as well, thanks!) and found a bit about a relationship that has sprung up between that blogger and another:

Antonella and I then corresponded not only via email, but also through tribe.net, and later through our blogs, taking advantage of various communication avenues, which in turn inflect the quality and nature of our distributed discussion.

And then I got it.

Of the top five things that give me the most pleasure, one is laughing; another is a state I can only describe as having my intellect piqued. I love to be excited by ideas.

So this is it, then. The blogs to which I choose to link will be those that have done at least one or the other. I will link to those that make me laugh, because I can think of few things I would rather do for people I love than to give them a chance to laugh, too. And as for those that excite my mind, I will link, for the pleasure of joining their distributed discussion.

More to come.

[tags]blogroll[/tags]