A short time ago, Fons Tuinstra, one of my Poynter.org colleagues, posed the question Do Blogrolls Still Matter? As many of the folks who answered Fons--and I have to agree--they do....
A couple of reasons why: First, they help readers find new and interesting blogs....
Second: they help us acknowledge folks who are important to our little corner of the blogosphere. They let people know who some of our connections happen to be.
Blogrolls are nice things. Blogrolls are community-building things. Blogroll *are* indeed still important.
If we keep them up.
Over the next couple of weeks, in between some new gigs like posting on the conversation hub for Supernova 2008 and my mulitple schizo-brain-making consulting gigs and my kidney stone surgery (gee...think I do too much?) I will be re-vamping the sidebar of this blog to link back to many of the great bloggers I know in the marketing 'sphere and they hyperlocal 'sphere and some who are just, well, regular readers and always there (you know who you are.) I've felt kind of weird for awhile that I haven't acknowledged so many of the cool marketers I know, and felt that there was no reason for me do be so doctrinaire and not link to them. And the hyperlocal 'sphere has grown by leaps and bounds over the past 6-9 months--so much so that both deserve their own sections on the blogroll. The others will just pop up in the categories already there.
You'll see them when I put them in.
I wish I could start it tonight, but I just took a percocet for some muscle spasms, and I'd hate to keel over mid-blogroll....
I'll also be putting up a post when there's been a *big* change....
Stay tuned :-)
3 comments:
Maintenance really is the hard part of blogrolls. That's why I finally just went ahead and linked to my entire list of Bloglines feeds.
I thought of doing that--but my Bloglines is full of all sorts of weird stuff. Some of it I don't even read any more, but don't have the heart to delete....
hmmm...perhaps I think of my Bloglines the way some folks think of their blogrolls...
anyway, I hope I can start doing the updates in the next couple of days.
I often feel like I want to divide my blogroll up into categories... though as soon as I start categorizing, nothing fits exactly right.
Sometimes I imagine having a blogroll to match each post - a kind of "other sites where people post about this topic include..." - but that's just too much work, and, anyway, I'd have to link to posts, not the blog.
Sometimes I imagine a widget that tracks who I read and could post a "top 10 sites Wendell visited this month". Then I think about privacy and the RCMP and stuff.
As for taking people out of the blogroll (or de-friending someone from Facebook, or dropping a multiply.com contact or )... that's fraught with "Dear Abby" issues. Good Luck!
:P
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