6 Reasons Blogrolls Are Dying
Aug 22
I posted a message to TechRhet this weekend that I thought would yield a fast result. I needed to gather a list of comp/rhet blogs for a project, and I want to make sure I didn’t leave anyone out.
I asked readers to pass along links if they had a great blogroll or knew of some wonderful blogs I should include.
The response? One message. That’s it. One message that pointed to one blog.
So I began searching for the links on my own, visiting friend’s blogs and scooping up links as I went along. I quickly observed that blogrolls are a dying breed.
- Fewer people have blogrolls. There was a time when everyone listed every blogger possible in the sidebar. Not the case any more. More than 1/2 of the blogs I visited had no blogroll at all.
- Blogrolls tend to be an unordered list, which makes their usefulness questionable. Presented with a giant list of blogs, you have nothing to go by but the blog name or the writer’s name. Sorted into categories or with tags, the list would be easier for visitors to use. As they stand on most blogs, they seem to be a simple list of friends and colleagues in most cases.
- The blogrolls I did find were not well-maintained. The lists were littered with broken links, dead blogs (i.e., the link works but there hasn’t been a new post on the blog in months), and links to old blogs, with pointers to a new home.
- Gathering a blogroll (and checking its links) is a time-consuming project. There’s a reason these things aren’t maintained. The only way to make use the blog links all work properly is to sit and click on each and every one.
- Blogrolls are suffering because blogs have more competition these days. Many colleagues are foregoing blogs for shorter status updates. On more than one blog, I found a note that indicated the person was going to update via Facebook or Twitter instead of maintaining the blog.
- Follower and Friend lists are replacing blogrolls. When you click follow or okay a friend, you create a list of colleagues that is quite similar to a blogroll—and which is infinitely easier to maintain. They take care of themselves. You never have to chase down the URLs or check for deleted accounts.
Ultimately, I collected a list of nearly 70 blogs. Feel free to copy it for your own site or send links to anything I left out. I just won’t promise you that I’ll maintain it for the long term.
[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by stevendepolo]
Aug 22, 2010 @ 14:18:11
Hey, Traci. This is Trauman. The guy who posted your one reply to the TechRhet listserve.
I wanted to make two points. The first is that I probably didn’t organize that response very well, but I did include a list of 61 other blogs (or sites that might pass as blogs). I’m going to take a look at your own list of 70, and hopefully, the two of them together will make a nice robust list.
The second point is that I share your interests about what the future might hold for blogging. The blogrolls point is a good one. I myself don’t have a blog roll on the main page. In fact, it’s not accessible at all at this point. I used to have a list of “pages” to go to in one of my sidebars, but somehow it got tossed out in one of my wordpress upgrades. Gotta fix that one.
I’m wondering if you think micro-updating/blogging sites like Twitter/FB/Tumblr/Posterous might actually be better at serving the functions that blogs used to? I’m finding that Twitter is an incredibly rich source of material, but there’s less reflection. I’ve always seen that as a function of humility more than anything else, but maybe there’s something else going on?
Aug 22, 2010 @ 14:30:07
Great thinking! You’re right, too. On one hand, it’s embarrassing how little I blog. On the other, it’s not like I am doing nothing. And thanks for putting me on your list. I did start a research blog last May, and it has more posts than my other blog but still in the single digits.
http://drnelsresearch.blogspot.com/
Aug 22, 2010 @ 14:40:05
Hmm. I don’t actually have a message from you, so if you want to reforward that list, Trauman, I’d love to see it.
I do believe teacher colleagues are moving more toward microblogging. The shorter updates are easier for a lot of folks and they can create more of a conversation than most blogs are able to maintain. Sure, if you’re Lifehacker, you can build a healthy discussion in the comments, but most of the collegues whose blogs I looked at aren’t getting that kind of interaction. Hmm again.. I think I have another entry to write now — Why teachers are turning to microblogging.
Aug 22, 2010 @ 14:52:34
Blogrolls were much more important back when lists and directories were the best way to organize the Internet, but I think we have all become more dependent on search. Rather than maintain a blogroll, I do regular blogosphere and Twitter searches for keywords that I follow.
I feel much the same way about comments. It’s so much easier to reweet something than fill out a form and maybe a CAPTCHA to leave a comment. I lament that we’re leaving third parties in control of our comments, though.
Aug 22, 2010 @ 15:13:09
Hey, Traci. Here’s the text of that email. I replied to the list, and it shows up in my own thread, but maybe it didn’t get through to the list:
“… here’s a link to my own blog:
http://www.digitalbibliography.com
And here are a bunch of others that I have file under “Rhet/Comp” in
my RSS reader. Some of the may/may-not fit your definition of a
Rhet/Comp blog, but I thought it’d be better to let you decide on
that. Also, some of them are really no longer active, but they still
might serve as great examples of how blogs can accomplish their work,
even if in the past tense.
Looking forward to seeing what other blogs people post here.
Best,
Trauman
Here’s that list:
http://5000.blogspot.com/
http://260days.weebly.com/index.html
http://www.21apples.org/
http://michaeljfaris.com/blog
http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home
http://henryjenkins.org/
http://aimeeknight.com/
http://betajames.posterous.com/
http://dhawhee.blogs.com/d_hawhee/
http://bdegenaro.blogspot.com/
http://www.ceball.com/blog
http://www.brianmcnely.com/
http://wrecking.org/cbd/about/
http://cce.typepad.com/cce/
http://christateston.wordpress.com/
http://locus.cwrl.utexas.edu/jbrown
http://www.collinvsblog.net/
http://culturecat.net/
http://blog.whitneyannetrettien.com/
http://thoughtpress.org/daniel
http://databeautiful.net/
http://www.velvethedgehog.com/deanya/blog
http://www.alex-reid.net/
http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg
http://www.ceball.com/tenure
http://drawingmeaning.blogspot.com/
http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/
http://grandtextauto.org/
http://josephdharris.wordpress.com/
http://insignificantwrangler.blogspot.com/
http://www.jenterysayers.com/
http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog/
http://jilltxt.net/
http://rid.olfo.org/
http://www.kassblog.com/
http://revisionspiral.blog-city.com/
http://www.jpwalter.com/machina
http://mkirschenbaum.wordpress.com/
http://phdumpingground.wordpress.com/
http://nickm.com/post
http://professorvj.blogspot.com/
http://chronicle.com/blog/ProfHacker/27/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/
http://repurposed.posterous.com/
http://rhetorica.net/
http://schizzesandflows.typepad.com/schizzes_and_flows/
http://spinuzzi.blogspot.com/
http://stevendkrause.com/
http://technoliteracy.blogspot.com/
http://tenaday.blogspot.com/
http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/
http://chronicle.com/section/News/6/
http://www.kathiegossett.com/forgottencanon
http://virtualpolitik.blogspot.com/
http://www.vitia.org/wordpress
http://wehaveneverbeenblogging.blogspot.com/
http://weblogg-ed.com/
http://mikejohnduff.blogspot.com/
http://ydog.net/
http://997blog.blogspot.com/“
Aug 22, 2010 @ 15:30:07
I quit trying to keep up blogrolls when I realized I wasn’t using them to navigate to those blogs myself. I rely on Google Reader, Facebook, and Twitter to tell me if anyone I know has just written a new post.
Still, I feel like I ought to take the time to build up blogrolls again. If nothing else, I could point other people toward sites I like. But…time…time…where to find the time?
Aug 22, 2010 @ 19:08:47
True, Sharon, a 7th reason: Not even the blog owners are using these blogrolls anymore. We use RSS readers and pokes from Twitter/Facebook to tell us when to go read someone’s blog proper.
That, of course, is why the maintenance bit becomes so annoying. We have to make a concerted effort to go click on the links (when we wouldn’t have otherwise).
Aug 22, 2010 @ 20:46:09
I know at Harlot we made a conscious decision not to include a blogroll. The maintenance would’ve been taxing in conjunction with all the other editorial duties, most of our consistent users use rss feed readers anyhow, and we didn’t want to inadvertently leave anybody out or somehow imply that we agree with the statements of the people/organizations we’d link to. As an individual I’d have no problem with listing the blogs I read in a blogroll, but when working with an organization it seemed sufficient enough to bring up other blogs and sites within the posts themselves rather than a blogroll.
Aug 22, 2010 @ 22:55:36
Hi there, stumbled across your post on a Twitter search. Interesting post.
When I set up my own blog this past year, I made the conscious decision not to include a blogroll for aesthetic reasons—both because I saw the blogroll itself as more cluttered than a list of links, but also because I didn’t like the idea of an old post sitting under a link for a long time.
I agree that search functions are more frequently utilized and probably more functional in many cases, but I can still see the value in using a blogroll. I may now set one up on my blog.
Speaking of, if you’d like another link, I am currently keeping two blogs, and have some blog lists you can mine, as well:
http://clavatuc.blogspot.com
http://ucwpassessment.wordpress.com
Aug 23, 2010 @ 10:06:14
Thanks for the list of blogs, Trauman. I can see why it didn’t get through on the list. WordPress moved it right to the spam pile too. All those links look like spam to the robotic eye.
A number of the links in your list are ones that are dead by the definition I went by since they haven’t had a post in the last month, but there were still a handful to add.
I also added the links from other commenters, so we’re up to 90 on the list now!
Aug 23, 2010 @ 10:14:42
Just a thought… given that RSS feeds have taken on much of the function of blogrolls, I’d bet there would be an audience for a feed that aggregates these blogs.
As the term starts rolling along
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Aug 26, 2010 @ 09:57:00
I think you’re right on. When I started my site (http://transmediame.wordpress.com/) I put together a basic blogroll but was never satisfied with it: it only covered a small number of existing rhet/comp bloggers, and I included some friends who didn’t really fit the list–but I didn’t have enough to put them in a whole new list of their own! I always said, “Oh, one day I’ll go fill that in and organize it some more,” but never have. I’ve never really clicked through to them, using Google Reader myself–it’s just for other visitors.
So I think Dennis is on the right track here: the idea of providing something (I think still on the blog’s sidebar) that lets folks grab all of the blogs at once via RSS. I’ve never played with this, but you know how Google Reader says, “Subscribe to this group of blogs all at the same time”? Surely that’s not hard to whip up on our own, to pass around? Plus, when I subscribed to the “Lost” group, and I already had a “Lost” folder in Reader, it seamlessly added the new feeds to my folder without duplicating–pretty clever stuff.
Just thinking out loud here….Thanks for the post!
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