Boone Gorges

This plugin adds a widget to your WPMU blog that allows the blog administrator to display a list of links from any blog on the installation. Imagine, for instance, that Josie is teaching a class in which she and each of her students have individual blogs. Josie’s got a list of important links (a class blogroll, or maybe links that are relevant to the class), and she’d like to share the links with her students. Using this plugin, her students can place a widget on their blogs that automatically pulls in a certain category of links from her blog.
At the moment, the plugin works like this: Drop the Shared Blogroll widget into one of your blog’s sidebars. You’ll need to know the blog_id of the blog from which you’ll be pulling the links. (This is the big weakness in the plugin for now. For the moment, I’ll probably add a line of code to the Dashboard that echoes the global $blog_id, so that blog owners will know their blog_id and be able to pass it along to other who want to share their links. In the future I may add autocomplete or something. If you have a suggestion, let me know.) Once you’ve entered the source blog id, the plugin automatically populates the Category dropdown list with the categories from the source blog, so if you only want to include one of the link categories you can. You can have as many shared blogroll widgets on a blog as you’d like.

Shared Blogroll

Creates a widget that pulls a category of links from any other blog on the same WPMU installation

pantsonhead

I don’t really like Blogrolls, I think they’re often not much more than glorified link dumps. I don’t like how they give you nothing more than the Blog title, and unless that title really grabs your attention, you’re never gonna click it. I don’t like how they are often just a static list, commonly out of date, that you learn to ignore after the first 4 page views. In their current format, they just appear to be a great waste of space.
This is why I decided to create the RSS Blogroll plugin. RSS Blogroll allows you to link to your favourite blogs via the latest items from their RSS/Atom feed. Article titles are much more attention grabbing and will deliver much higher quality traffic. We all hate clicking through to abandoned blogs – displaying article publication dates also lets readers know these are up to date and active sites.
Many of us want to direct some of our traffic to related sites. RSS Blogroll will create deeplinks to the target sites, which are much more useful for SEO than homepage links. Overall it’s a win-win situation with a better browsing experience for users and the linked sites getting more visitors who are actually interested in their content.

RSS Blogroll

Sidebar widget that links to recent entries from RSS/Atom feeds.

Shared Blogroll vs RSS Blogroll