I suppose my dream would be that the protocolization of this from back in the day gets revived in some way. Like a google pagecrawl style index built up from blogrolls (though I don't know if the blogroll itself was ever literally protocol-ized), combined with some checking of RSS feeds for activity. Or webrings, or something else.

Though in some respects these are less smart than what you're already doing, but I would like to think there's an elegant way to make an index emerge organically to minimize the editorial burden of any one person.