Bill opens up his private 'Bloglines' blogrolls

Until now my blogrolls appearing in this blog have been restricted to those hosted at Blogrolling.com. Now as an experiment I have added my full 'unexpurgated' blog reading list included in one of the RSS feed aggregators I use, Bloglines.com. I haven't yet decided whether I shall leave these new additions here indefinitely, but I suspect they will remain for a few weeks at least.

My Blogrolling blogrolls continue to appear in their usual positions in the right column. The Bloglines blogrolls appear way down the right column in a new section headed: 'Bloglines Blogrolls'.

There are several reasons why I haven't included certain blogs in my public blogrolls hitherto:

- they are relatively 'new' to me so I haven't got around to 'promoting' them to my public blogrolls; however there are now so many in this category that it has become very unwieldy to update my public blogrolls regularly, so including the 'Bloglines' feed here circumvents that unwieldiness;

- I have not considered them 'suitable' for appearance in my public blogrolls, because they are 'gay' blogs which are pretty explicit in the images and/or words they use, specially for the delicate eyes (lol - Ed) of people who are not 'gay'; I've decided to abandon this pretence - I read many explicit 'gay' blogs and have ceased to care what others may think about this; it just is;

- I have not considered them 'suitable' for appearance in my public blogrolls, because they are 'extreme' in some way, usually in the politics they help to propagate. However, whilst I may dislike intensely the political ideas that some people believe in, quite apart from fearing them, I have come to believe this is a 'cop out' - these ideas exist and need to be confronted, not brushed away under the carpet;

- Many blogs which have gone dormant, or the writer has announced they will no longer be updated, have been removed from my public 'Blogrolling' blogrolls, usually after about three months of dormancy. However I remove dormant/dead blogs from my 'Bloglines' RSS feeds much less often, just in case the writers decide to resurrect them, so some of the links there have not been updated in some time - nevertheless they were blogs I found interesting to read, so don't want to lose track of them entirely

Even with all this effort at 'transparency' however, there are still some blogs that are very well-known that you won't find anywhere in my blogrolls, whether hosted by Blogrolling or Bloglines, as I simply don't read them; in most cases I did read them in the past, but have ceased doing so. I'm not going to name them here because that would potentially give them a little additional publicity; the only time I ever visit these blogs is if some of those websites I do read include links to them in articles.

I don't pretend any or all of this is particularly logical or defensible; like most people I am a mass of contradictions and although my 'strapline' at the top of this blog is 'Striving for Objectivity, Combatting Bigotry' I'm not naive enough to believe, or even to pretend to others, that I have achieved either aim in its entirety. However, if you have managed to get this far, perhaps you'll find a few links in these new additons of interest to you.