As if I needed confirmation that I’m a barely-noticeable ripple in the blogospheric ocean:
This past weekend Atrios, the proprietor of Eschaton, declared a Blogroll Amnesty Day, saying, “one of the big complaints by new bloggers is that it’s impossible to get onto blogrolls because established bloggers tend not to add them.” I thought that adding new lesser-known blogs to his blogroll would be a wonderful idea. Although for some inexplicable reason that I am at pains to discover, Atrios has never seen fit to link to me, I, nevertheless added Eschaton to my own blogroll and introduced myself to Atrios with a sincerely sycophantic email, since he is after all a blogging pioneer who deserves our respect.
But the more I learned about this Amnesty Day, the more I realized that it was a very strange amnesty indeed. The amnesty he granted turned out to be amnesty for himself. He wanted to assuage himself of the guilt he might feel at kicking blogs off his blogroll instead of granting amnesty to others to swarm across the border into his domain
The most exciting events of the year — Blogroll Amnesty Day — and I missed it!
Once I was made belatedly made aware of this important event, and after first checking with other large and Very Important Personages to confirm that this post-gorge purge was The Right Thing To Do, I hastened to cast my gimlet eye over my own admittedly humble blogroll.
Surely there was somebody there worth offending deleting?
But as my mouse randomly hovered over a link’s “delete”, I had a nightmare vision. What if I removed someone, and they didn’t even notice?
How humiliating!
I mean, if you’re a really big, important blogo-monster, the best reason to delete someone from a blogroll (much less the entire list), is to make them beg to come back, right?
In the end, I decided to let my links stand rather than risk my purge passing unnoticed… but be warned! I’ve got this important date added to my calendar. There’s always next year.