August 21st 2007 / learned
Blog Rolls??
In my wanderings around the great big Internet I often come upon fresh blogs, new kids on the block so to speak. And on these blogs with no more than three posts in the archives—two of which are a “welcome to _blank” and a “Sorry I haven’t posted in a month… here’s why”—I tend to find these extremely impressive blog rolls that read like a who’s who of web design and blogging.
I’m baffled by this.
Why in the world would anybody automatically link to someone they don’t know? Is it the misconception that it supplies instant blog cred? Do these blog owners think their blog will explode if it contains a link to a well known blog? Or is this just fandom run rampant?
I would never link to anyone I didn’t know. It seems to me that most of these blog roll “regulars” would ignore any requests to return the favor in kind, and probably don’t even know your blog exists, so what is the point with wasting valuable ad/content space with a list of links of already over linked blogs belonging to people whom don’t even appreciate the link back?
When did Blog Rolls stop being a list of actual friends that blog and instead become a list of the biggest names in blogging and web development you can think of?
Enlighten me.
“Blog Rolls??” was written by James Mathias on August 21st 2007
A writer, artist and outlaw. Living, working and playing in Tennessee. James writes TAO in a vain effort to teach, learn and share with the industry he loves.
feedback, comments & opinions
5 comments
Hey Brad, yeah I could see that being the case, but then the argument could be made that in fact that section of links should be titled “Inspiration” or “sites I like”, whereas blog roll dictates relationship, which in 99% of cases is not in fact something that these bloggers can claim of any of the folks on their blog roll.
This of course is all relative and subjective to opinion and point of view, and I mean no offense to anyone that practices the above.
I’ve just been looking at things from a communicative stand point recently and noticed little things like this which give the wrong impression.
Now you bring up a really interesting point of discussion. I don’t think every blogger is using the same definition of “blogroll” as you are. I agree with you, that a blogroll is supposed to consist of people who you are friends with, or at least on a mutual level of acquaintance with. To clear things up, I decided to check with a 3rd party on this… You’re not going to like the “official” answer from wikipedia (how official can a wikipedia entry be?)
Various weblog authors have different criteria for including other weblogs on their blogrolls. These range from matters of common interest to frequency of updates and posts to country/geographical/communal relations to link exchange policies. Some blogrolls also simply consist of the list of weblogs an author reads him or herself, and some news aggregators allow their users to export that list directly to a weblog. - Source
Based on this, I’d have to say a blogroll isn’t really as much of a communicative tool as just a reading list. Still, while this seems to be the “popular” opinion (based on the fact that no one has rewritten it), I think the term “Blogroll” puts forth a completely different message than just “I like to read Eric Meyer’s blog”.
Well, I’m not too concerned with what wikipedia says on the subject, it is in fact just one persons opinion. I think the main issue I’m having is that because it communicates to me a relationship, it is entirely within reason to assume it’s communicating that to others who might not know better.
Anything and everything on your web-site is a communicative tool, otherwise it is useless chatter and should be removed, in my opinion.
I’m working on stripping useless noise off all my web-sites in order to make room for more concise and interesting communication and content.
Design elements aside, a blog roll is information and it communicates to the reader even if on a sub conscious level and I think it’s important to be clearer in our online communications especially since they often lack important elements, such as tone, inflection, body cues and language.
Being one to still troll your blogs and sites every now and then James, I found this particular entry very interesting. In light of clearing things up I think you should propose a new term to describe a “blogroll” that fits this description. Also, it brings up a profitable idea for a new “2.0″ site that could house a “social blogging” atmosphere through a remote api interface. This could be something as simple as allowing users to register their blog and associate their blogs with other blogs with a push, pull method (something like facebook’s “verify this is a friend” type system). Then being able to access this information via several types of widgets (xml feed, flash app, javascript app [similar to google ads], clearspring technologies).
This would provide some type of authenticity to your relationship with other bloggers. I think technorati might do something similar but I haven’t played with it much to really say whether it does or doesn’t. With the way the web is going with communicating ideas (social networking up the whazoo) it could take off rather quickly if marketed correctly.
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J. Bradford
08/22/07 4:58 am
my guess: New blogger is blogging because he was inspired by those awesome bloggers on said blogroll. Thought process = “They blog about all these great things, so I should do that too!”. Truth of the matter is that they should NOT have a blog because they CANNOT write good content and are HORRIBLE at keeping up with things like that. This is more about why they stopped blogging, i suppose, but it makes sense for someone who is NOT a blogger to list the blogs that inspired them in their blogroll.
If that didn’t make sense, it’s because it’s effing early.