Fledge posts about his blogroll and triggered a few thoughts on my end1.

To admit, Fledge's Haibane.info was the first anime blog that I really started reading on a regular basis. I can honestly say that I was introduced to several other anime bloggers, including Steven, and Author, either from comments or Fledge directly linking to them. I don't fully remember how I first started reading his blog2, but I do remember that I started reading it regularly about when I started up this blog3.

When I started up this blog, I used the blogroll on it as my gateway into the anime blogging circles. Basically, my morning consisted of waking up, pulling up my site, and clicking on every link in the "Anime Fans" section to search for new content. I did realize that this is inherently inefficient, so, like Fledge, I ended up using Google Reader to keep track of the bloggers I read4. I will still leave the blogroll as it is, as I still recommend all of those bloggers for several reasons5, but this site has since cease become my portal to the anime blogging community that I frequent.

I am flattered that Fledge and other bloggers add this site to their own blogroll. I don't believe in link exchanges, so I won't necessarily automatically link to someone that linked my site, but I will make time to visit those site that refer visitors to here. It astounds me how often I'll find foreign sites linking to some of my posts on The Twelve Kingdoms novels or on Makoto Shinkai6. In truth, though, I'm not all that worried about traffic quantity.

Now, for a few more direct responses to Fledge's post:

I rely on the blogs in my blogroll to act as filters for me.

I do the exact same thing here on the receiving side, and try to do the same on the giving side. Sometimes, I'll read a bit more in the blogs they link to and will decide to add them into my feed list in Google Reader. I try to link to interesting anime blogs that I stumble onto too.

...be yourself.

Should be the golden rule for blogging in general.

As a side note, I seem to do my best blogging late at night, right before I head to bed. If this is because the "worst critic" in my head is too tired to care at this point is a thought that passed fleetingly through the chaos in there7...8.

1. 1. Somewhat treading on the tenth blogging cliché (via)
2. 2. Most likely when looking up what people were saying about Haibane Renmei
3. 3. No, Fledge had no influence on the creation of this blog; I had the idea of blogging the impressions I have of anime as I watch them to help me when I write my reviews on AnimeNfo.com. The purpose of this blog has, obviously, diverged from that idea. In fact, I'm actually writing less reviews when I started this blog.
4. 4. One downside of using a feed reader is that I don't keep track of comments on other blogger's site as well as manually visiting them. Comment RSS feeds is the answer on sites that have them. I need to setup a proper Comment RSS feed for this blog.
5. 5. Truthfully, I need to move Twenty Sided to my less focussed blog.
6. 6. Though everything is dwarfed by my MKV to AVI conversion guide in terms of referrals, visitors, or comments. I originally created the guide because I didn't find any single comprehensive guide for it and I ended up figuring out to do it through bits and pieces of data around the net and documenting what I did. It has since inspired at least one other conversion guide that provides an alternate way of doing it.
7. 7. Note to self: make use of preview and publishing options so that I can write something down that can be posted later. Also, nested footnotes do not work. I may have to dig in the module a bit to get that working.
8. 8. Ok, Nick, get to bed. The stream-of-consciousness you're doing in the footnotes are going to make them as long as the article itself!