I've binned the little gold stars that sat next to about twenty names on the blogroll. I started this in 2002 after meeting a fellow blogger for the first time because it was, back then, quite remarkable in a proto-artificial-social-network kinda way. Then a few more were added and, until I removed them this morning, more than half the people on my blogroll had little stars next to their names.

But this innocent little social networking protocol doesn't work any more for a number of reasons :

Relationships are considerably more complex than a little star denoting 'I have met this person in real life' can possibly communicate. Some people I've barely met, others I've met many times and are now proper friends. Besides, proper Artificial Social Networks such as Orkut cannot even achieve the degree of resolution required to properly articulate the complexities of social networks, so I suppose my little star system operated on an ameobic level of ASN evolutionary sophistication in comparison with Flickr or Orkut, both of which have probably now evolved to the equivalent state of proto-amphibians having tiny little eyes and stunted fins, to further abuse the evolution metaphor.

Whilst excusable during the initial blog wonderment phase, it now probably looks quite weird in a stalker-ish, name-checky, social tourism, A-list sucker-upper way.

I don't really need to declare a personal attachment, by whichever means, to the great and the good of the blogging world as if to build my own credibility. Whilst not the purpose of affixing star icons in the first place, I suspect that over time this factor may have subconciously played a role in my not deleteing the little star graphics sooner.