:: netwoman's blog ::

Blogrolls - Good or Bad?

As always, Shelly has such interesting and thought provoking commentary over at Burningbird. In particular, Shelly sends her message:

"In fact, to every weblogger who has a blogroll: you are hurting all of us. Rarely do people discover new webloggers through blogrolls; most discovery comes when you reference another weblogger in your writings. But blogrolls are a way of persisting links to sites, forming a barrier to new voices who may write wonderful things — but how they possibly be heard through the static, which is the inflexible, immutable, blogroll?"

It's true that many 'people' refuse to link to the 'little people' of the blog ecosystem, and they often get lost in the shuffle. It's the link game, it's often a popularity contest. If a D list blogger is blogging, and no one is around to read it, are they really blogging....but anyway, you get the point...

Having said that, Shelly took down her blogroll, and encouraged others to do the same, which Lauren and others have done.

Some, such as Bitch PhD and myself, think that this might not be the way to go.
The problem is that we are missing some of the 'less popular' bloggers and promoting those who are already popular - the blog celebrities. Many people find other bloggers via blogrolls. Popular bloggers can be found by searching Google - but not the case for those bloggers with a small readership.

Really, I think it is our 'duty' to actively seek out these bloggers (somehow) and link them and talk about their ideas (if that is indeed what they want, as some people don't blog for the audience, but rather for themselves). Removing our blogrolls really defeats the purpose. Perhaps we should think more closely about who we include in our blogroll and the reasons why we do so. I don't have a blogroll on here, but you have access to my RSS feeds through Bloglines. Have a look.

Shelly says :

"Then we would all start fresh. It would be a new start, and the emphasis would be less on who we know and who we are, then what is being said."

We can't read what they say, if we don't know they're there.

posted by Netwoman @ 2:21 PM