Soundtrack in my head:  Badly Drawn Boy, "The Shining"

At one point last night my computer rebooted itself, and when I did, all my bookmarks I had on Firefox were gone.  So I had to go and manually look for all the blogs I regularly read.   

In some ways, it might have been a good thing, because I read enough blogs to the point where if I don't stop myself, I'll get nothing else done.  I realized that there were some I really don't want to read anymore, and I also realize that there have been some blogs I've been reading regularly that I haven't linked to.  So I've updated my links to include ones that I do read regularly and would actually recommend to others.

Linking is sort of a weird thing.  Some people I link to are pretty good friends online, some I really don't know at all.   When I first started blogging,  I'd sort of troll for online friends, and a few actually did become good friends, (including one blogger whose religion I'd later convert to) but I confess that it was for partially selfish reasons--i.e. traffic.  Well, traffic seems to be doing all right--it seems to double every year, and it doubled yet again when I joined the Baha'i Faith.  I don't always even tell people that I link to them--sometimes I worry like I might come across like I want something from them.  Then, of course there are these blogroll programs that list all of them automatically somehow, and I ended up getting linked to a lot because I registered as a blogger on SavetheInternet.com.

So my rule of thumb is this--if I've been reading a blog for awhile and I like it and would recommend it to others, I'll link.  Nothing more, nothing less.

Oh, and a request to those who do link to me.  The name of the blog is The Different Drummer Soundtrack.  It says so on the banner.  I use the URL www.thedifferentdrummer.net because I was amazed to find it available, so I snatched it.  But that's not the name of the blog.  If you put me down as The Different Drummer, please keep in mind that I require a Soundtrack.