Back when I first started reading blogs, and then blogging myself, blogrolls were a pretty big deal. It was, bloggers believed, a way to generate traffic and an extension of the reciprocal linking that is unique to blogging.
That was three years ago, and it seems that times have changed substantially:
Once upon a time in the land of the blogs, the blogroll reigned suprmeme. Everyone had a blogroll, and it was a great way to discover new and interesting blogs. But somewhere along the way blogrolls fell out of favor, and you don’t seem them much at all today.
(…)
Unlike other areas of blogging, where today we see great new services (such as in the commenting space) nothing has seemingly popped up to replace blogrolls. Outbrain offers contextual links across sites, which is a handy feature, but it’s not a blogroll replacement. Something like Regator, but offered white-label could be another possible alternative. Inquisitir iQ wasn’t created as a blogroll alternative, but it’s the closest way I’ve got today to sharing links to content and people I like (and I’ll be adding some new pages next week).
So what happened to the blogroll? Is there any alternatives you’re aware of? Or am I being overly sentimental? Leave a comment below or reply via video in the Seesmic embed with your thoughts.
I still maintain a personal blogroll through blogrolling.com, as well as the “community” blogrolls listed on the right, and I’ve even updated them a few times over the past several months, but I can’t honestly say that I use them anymore. Moreover, I’m fairly sure that a good number of the blogs listed on the right are either totally defunct, dead, or only updated occassionally.
Although I will occassionally click on a blogroll link, the vast majority of my blog reads come through the RSS feeds that I track through Google Reader (which pretty much matches the personal blogroll maintained here). Additionally, most of the traffic that comes this way — outside of Google searches or links from sites like Reddit or Digg — comes via links to a specific post or from other people’s RSS readers. There are still some people who seem to find their way here thanks to a link in a blogroll, but it’s down to a few dozen a day at most based on what I’ve seen.
So, does this mean the blogroll is dead ? And if it is, what, if anything, can replace it ?
H/T: Outside The Beltway
False dichotomy. The RSS aggregator and the blogroll can be one and the same. Bloglines and Blogrolling have both offered this option (i.e., embedding on a website) for years. I use it for my blogroll.
Google Reader does not yet offer (to the best of my knowledge) the option of embedding it onto one’s blog, but I’m sure it will come eventually.
And if GR does offer imbedding at some point, I’ll probably use it.
The broader question, though, is what value the blogroll has at this point.