Before, blogrolling had to periodically go to weblogs.com, which is pinged by many bloggers to tell that site the blog is updated. Then blogrolling marked that blog as "new" in all the lists created by different bloggers and displayed on their pages. This meant there was a delay between me updating and you seeing that I've updated on, for instance, jen's weblog. Now, I update and it appears almost immediately there. This is a good example of how systems can work faster, and often better, when functions are distributed. Now blogrolling users don't technically need weblogs.com to keep track of each other. Now most folks are not exceptionally fascinated by immediately knowing that I've updated. But lots of other computer systems need that speed more. Weblogs guy Dave Winer wonders how big the blog universe can get before weblogs can't handle it anymore. This kind of distributed updating might be one answer. Of course, blogrolling.com will have the same problem. But you can have more than one blogrolling. Maybe many. This doesn't mean that weblogs.com would go away, but it might change its role. This would mean that the universe would no longer be completely "connected" in terms of updates (at least at the current speed), but it might be faster for each "galaxy". These kinds of tradeoffs are just part of life. I also have the feeling that the blog world is getting out ahead of a lot of the rest of the high-tech world in developments. Stay tuned.