Throwing Sand out of the Box

I have drastically reduced my blogroll (I call it my sandbox, where I play) from over thirty to under ten. I found I could not keep up with the reading, and I am the type of person (a bit OCD?...well, I was delighted to get a Roomba robotic vacuum for Christmas!) who feels guilty if he subscribes to something and doesn't at least read it regularly. So I copied and pasted the list, filed it away, and ruthlessly cut. What is left for now are:

Sandbox
Critical Mass: Thoughtful commentary by Penn academic Erin O'Connor.
Crooked Timber: Widely read group blog. Love the title (from a saying by Kant).
Joho the Blog: David Weinberger has many things to say about the new technologies and a new epistemology: Remember, "trees are in trouble" and what is in are what Nick Burbules refers to as the Deleuzean rhizomes.
Maud Newton: Keeps me up on the lit world; uneven guest bloggers there now til Maud gets back from taking time away to write her book.
Michael Bérubé: Lively writing about hockey, academic freedom, family, the canon...who hasn't read MB's articles or opinion pieces, they are all over the place, and his blog is fun too.
Nick Burbules - PBD: A marvelous compendium, Nick reads and digests for all of us the best of the blogs 'n feeds on the war in Iraq, domestic politics, and such. I turn to Nick to get a progressive spin on current events. Quite a remarkable resource.
NYT - Education: I get the NYT main stories sent to my e-mail and to my PDA, so I keep up on education news via this feed. Good stuff recently on the new SAT especially, and of course, l'affaire de Larry Summers.
Peter Suber - OAN: I went to graduate school in philosophy with Peter Suber, and he reads and absorbs an enormous amount of knowledge. Peter made spare cash in graduate school by twirling a toilet plunger while giving a rapid fire talk on force field physics, doing this for trade shows and an appearance on the Tonight Show. Peter now makes his living by promoting open access to scholarly material, or what he used to call "free online scholarship." His personal website contains a wealth of resources on everything from philosophy to open access and many other topics. As I recall, there is a site there he has developed entirely devoted to knots!
Sherman Dorn: another friend who edits an online journal of educational policy, and thinks long and hard about issues regarding teaching, academic freedom, and such.

Well, there's my new sandbox. Fewer toys in it. More time to concentrate on just a few now, and to read them more carefully AND get my other work done. I am sure the sandbox will change, and maybe even grow again, but I need to be vigilant and not follow every possibly interesting link!