Just been looking through some of the very interesting stuff Jon Udell has written.

In his piece Hives, swarming, scale, and connectedness he discusses how, if you look at blogrolls, people seem to be primarily "a member of the Radio community" or "a member of the Blogger community."

"Once swarming can occur, the publish/subscribe RSS machinery can really start to shine. Things are, honestly, a bit incestuous in the blogrolling world, at least so far. "Tell me who you read, and I'll tell you who you are," I saw somewhere recently. Problem is, the blogrolls all look a lot alike. Being a member of the Radio community, or the Blogger community, shouldn't ultimately be a primary affiliation. People are software developers, or musicians, or knitters, or ... well, lots of things, often more than one. "

This seems to be describing something quite familiar to me.  The idea of BlogPlexing would be to allow you to get in touch with the communities of software developers, musicians or knitters without really having to do anything much, other than be interested in things those kind of communities talk about (expressing that interest by writing some of those things yourself).

At the moment there is a very manual process involved just in becoming part of the Radio community.  Creating a blogroll, harvesting interesting RSS links, subscribing and so forth.  Although there are clever ways emerging to make this easier I think that they the less interesting problem.

Just come across the Ageless Project -- weblogs sorted by their authors date of birth.

From jill/txt:

"Mailing lists are different to blogs. I love the differences between individual blogs, the autonomy of each and the sometimes unpredictable emergence of clusters and conversations that may shift as groupings change or ideas converge. Mark's artificial life experiments suit this genre perfectly. Mailing lists are pre-defined spaces, where everyone's words are made to look identical and the audience is known though changeable. In mailing lists I often feel intimidated by the weight of other peoples' words. So I remain silent. In my blog my audience is both potentially wider and pragmatically more limited. I'm completely confident that bored or uninterested readers will not stay. I love that. For me, blogs are so much more liberating of free discussions than mailing lists. I imagine some others feel oppositely?"