Since I don't yet feel part of a blogging community (I've only really been at it for a couple of weeks - I have no idea how long it takes.  Or perhaps I have nothing interesting to say??) my thoughts are very much on how you become part of a community and how you can encourage communities to form around shared ideas and values.  I think there is a role for technology to play here.

What I have in mind is a program, I haven't thought of a name so lets just call it blog connector (BC for short), that you can register your blog with.  BC then indexes your blog and creates a list of key words that it thinks are relevant to the content on your site.  You are then asked to prune, extend and rank the keywords.

Then BC takes a look through all the other blogs it has indexed looking for blogs whose keywords have similar rankings.  It checks to see whether you are already linking to those blogs and if not it sends you a suggestion that you might want to check out that blog and/or link to it.  It also applies the same criteria to the other blogs, optionally sending them similar information about your blog.

I imagine this last step maybe working as an RSS feed (with web pages and email as other options) and having many controls to adjust the flow of information, block unwanted intrusions, and so on.  It would also need to be clever enough not to keep recommending things it has already sent you.  I think all these caveats could be addressed.

I'd welcome any thoughts, insights or criticisms concerning this idea.  Maybe someone already thought of it and is doing it?