What Happened to Blogrolls?
November 25, 2008 by Deb
Filed under Community Building
When FWJ began making the switch from single blog to blog network I decided to clean up a few things that have been neglected, for example, the blogroll. I hadn’t added any new blogs in some time, even though I come across great blogs every day. Moreover, I know a few of the links in my sidebar were dead. So I removed the blogroll for revamping.
At the same time, I started looking at many of the top blogs and top bloggers and noticed something interesting. Most of them didn’t have a blogroll and if they did it was kept down to a minumum. Less than a dozen links in many cases. Why is this?
What happened to the blogroll? Is it that we don’t care about helping out our fellow bloggers anymore? It used to be we prided ourselves with a big blogroll filled with friends and good stuff from others. Now, it seems that top bloggers consider the blogroll a thing of the past. When I look at a top blogger’s sidebar nowadays I see ads, links to products, popular posts and top commenters.
So I will ask you…should we still care about blogrolls? Would you rather see popular posts and comments than links to other blogs? Why do you suppose the blogroll is falling to the wayside? Is it because ads and products are more important than community and sharing links?
Discuss…
