I thought it was worth mentioning that Joseph Thornley, who blogs at ProPr and is based in Ottawa, has decided to eat some of his own Social Media dogfood and has released two wordpress plugins today along with 76Design.

FriendsRoll reminds me a lot of, well, a traditional blogroll. The big difference however is that it has a form which friends can fill out and request to be added to your FriendsRoll. It is a cool and simple way to keep blogrolls a little more fresh over time. Right now they usually get stale with old blogs that aren’t maintained, or people who are not blogging about different, less relevant, subjects.

The other widget, TopLinks, automatically keeps track of what sites you are linking to in your blog posts and it lists them in the widget, ordered by popularity.

Both of these widgets help create mini little networks between blogs, but require little ongoing maintenance. I will be installing them on my personal blog as soon as I update my template.