Interesting article about the apparent decline of the blogroll.
A blogroll is a list of links to blogs that you read. It’s usually kept in the sidebar of the main page somewhere.
A blogroll serves two purposes:
- For the user of it, it’s a convenient menu to leap off to pages one visits regularly (or irregularly).
- It’s also a nice “shout-out” to those same people. There’s something extremely cool about being on someone else’s blogroll — a sign that, hey, they like me, they really like me. It’s part of the web, the community, the (sometimes-illusion-of) dialog in the blogosphere.
It’s also a pain to keep up. Either you have to code it manually (bleah), or else rely on a service. Blogrolling is the most common one — but it has its own problem (latency, downtime, clunky interface).
I’ve noticed this decline, and have my own theories as to why it’s happening. Part of what’s changed to reduce blogrolls as a presence — aside from some folks either becoming “too big” to carry one, or “too big” to worry about whether they’re linked with anyone — is (here’s a theme for the week) RSS Aggregators and the like, that let you easily track, read, and go to pages you want to track, read, and (maybe) go to. That makes keeping a separate blogroll redundant (as far as Reason 1 is concerned).
Still, if it’s fading away, it will be a shame — it was a it of community, and various tools let you use it to see how the world is really linked together. And, heck, for those of us who like little graphic buttons, it was a great excuse to make them …
(via Instapundit)
Personally, I love the blogrolling. I would have never found Marn, Scott or Les(SEB) without your blogroll. I also like the fact that they get a little star when they update so I know to go check them out. This is good for sites like SEB that updates frequently, but also good for sites like Marn or Doyce who update less so.
I’d hate to see the feature disappear. Then again, maybe I need to start a different habit to view everyone’s Blog. To me, it’s a convenience thing. I won’t die if it goes away, but it will make life a bit more difficult.
Good observation. I’ve had mixed luck in “the blogroll of my blogroll is my blogroll” serendipity, but there’ve been a few I wouldn’t have found otherwise, yes.
The Decline of Blogrolls
Mike posted a thoughtful entry on the decline of blogrolls. I actually removed my blogroll from my sidebar tonight, while adding my linkblog. My reasoning was pretty simple: It was out of date. There we sites on my blogroll that I no longer read, and t…