I used to have a blogroll. In the early days of blogging (I started in December of 2000) most bloggers would have lists of links to their favorite blogs. Usually that was placed on the side of their blog.

Eventually there were too many blogs. Or they got stale. So they became pretty useless. Then they started getting removed from many people’s blogs and getting replaced with other things (For instance, Dave Winer (the guy who was one of those who got me into blogging) used to have a nice blogroll, now he just has lists of magazines that have written about him). UPDATE: funny, he just added something called “Newsjunk” which is an aggregator of current tech news, similar to what I’m talking about here.

Then came Technorati, which searched blogs and many of us just put a link to Technorati, or their top 100 page, just to help our readers find other blogs that might be interesting.

Tonight I was talking with Twine’s CEO, Nova Spivack. Twine is a new way to keep bookmarks and other data from around the Web. I will talk about that when it comes out of public beta in October sometime, but talking with him I realized that I have a new blogroll that’s always up to date and always evolving and that’s far more interesting than the older static ones, or the ones that just show popularity like Technorati showed.

Here it is. How is it done? I watch thousands of people’s input. Their YouTube videos. Their blogs. Their Flickr photos. Their music. Their events. Their Tweets or microblogs from Tumblr, Identi.ca, Plurk, etc. And much more.

But not everything gets onto that page. Only things I comment on or click “Like” on.

Why is this better than the old blogroll?

Well, for one, you get a lot more “new” voices. Thanks to “Friend of a Friend” feature I see a lot of new people every day and if I like what they’ve done (I usually do, if the people on FriendFeed recommended it) then I click “Like” and add a comment.

Two: instead of just having a blog post and a URL, you can see why I liked that post. You can also see how OTHER PEOPLE liked that post (and who, and how many).

Plus, you can search, even on my comments that I added seconds ago.

Have you found a better way to share your favorite people’s stuff that’s coming through your screen?