On "To blogroll or not to blogroll"

There is, I think, a fairly interesting discussion going on about the merits of the blogroll.

It started, as best I can tell, with Burningbird's post, who mourns the lost opportunity to really explore the diversity of the blogosphere during the recent "Women vs. Men bloggers" discussion:

For once, we had the opportunity to actually explore issues of diversity in weblogging — international as compared to US-based webloggers; white as compared to not white; male and female. We could have grown and been enriched, and maybe we would all been the better for it. More importantly, we may have looked more closely at the technology that drives our perceptions, and had a chance to explore whether blogrolls and popularity lists are more harm then they are worth.

Instead, in a burst of emotional self-defense, it became Whitey versus the Gang. I am waiting for one or more of you to put “White Male and Damn Proud of It!” stickers in your sidebars, as you nod among yourselves about putting down this particular insurrection. After all, this is the ultimate egalitarian environment–anyone can have a weblog. Anyone can become famous. All you have to do, is write well.

Except that you forget that popularity in this environment can lead to opportunity, which, in turn, generates more popularity, and hence more opportunity and so on. Or maybe I have it wrong–you never forget this.

I agree with this completely, and it was a badly missed opportunity.   However, Burningbird's final decision, I think, reaches the wrong conclusion when saying that blogrolling, the Ecosystem, and Technorati hurt the process:

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?

So for all of you who have a blogroll, you are also hurting us.

If I had a wish right now, I would wish one thing: that we remove all of our blogrolls and take down the EcoSystem and the Technorati 100 and all of the other ‘popularity’ lists. That whatever links exist, are honest ones based on what has been written, posted, published, not some static membership in a list that is, all too often, stale and out of date, and used as a weapon or a plea.

The conversation it spawned was given legs when Lauren agreed and decided to remove her blogroll. Since then, I've seen more conversation on aldahlia, Arete, Rox Populi, and Bitch Ph. D. Here are my two cents.

First of all, I've never really seen the merit of the extraordinarily long blogroll (the kind that seems to made up mostly of reciprocal links).  It seems to me, in some way, to be about gaming the system ("this person helped me, so I will help them, and together we will take down the bastards at the top").   For instance, and this isn't meant as an insult to Roxanne, but I would sincerely doubt that she reads my blog every day, despite the fact that I'm on her blogroll (which is one of the longer I've seen).  Maybe I'm wrong, but I doubt it. 

But that's ok, because I don't think the end-all purpose of the blogroll should be simply to indicate which blogs you read every day but, rather, should be an indication of blogs with which you most wish to align yourself with or, put another way, endorse most fully.  I don't have to link to the major bloggers, even though I read them often, because everyone is going to find them.  My blogroll is for people who I want to see get greater exposure because of their unique voice.  This greater exposure remains relative to the degree to which they are already exposed, so my link simply exists to indicate my desire to see that exposure grow.

It is about networking in the purest sense of the term.  It gives me a great deal of pleasure to see one of the blogs I've linked to show up on someone else's blog that I've linked to.  We are all central hubs of a network, and as our networks spread out a bit, so does our ability to reach others with our message.

There is, I think, merit to the idea that blogrolls are rarely explored.  It isn't very often that people come to my blog because I am on Roxanne's blogroll but from some things I wrote on her site during my guestblogging stint.  This brings up the real problem, which does not spring from the existence of blogrolls, but from the fact that there doesn't exist a tool which weights links that are provided because of actual, specific content that a blogger posts higher than just a constant, blogrolled link.  In other words, it would solve the problem if we had a quality linking system instead of a quantity linking one.

All that being said, and I wrote about this in the comments at Arete, it would be a shame to see any movement sweeping the blogosphere to do away with blogrolls.  I don't think we are in much danger of this, but as Bitch Ph. D. said in the comments on Roxanne's blog, "I think that it’s problematic, frankly, that people like you and Lauren are thinking of ditching your blogrolls. Because you guys are FAR more likely to link to sites that AREN’T the big boys, and by removing your blogrolls, you’re removing links to those other sites, and just knocking ’em further down the technorati and TTLB rankings." 

It isn't a perfect system, but it is a decent system and if a large group of reasonable bloggers do away with it, they aren't helping and, as Veronica said, like saying that you don't like the way the game is played so you are taking your ball and going home.

The problem is, the people who are going home are precisely the ones we really need to continue playing.

Comments

[Ms.Q]

There are certainly problems with blogrolls, but most of the great blogs I have discovered, I discovered through someone's blogroll. I don't see the value in throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I disagree with almost everything that Burningbird said. I think Lauren was too hasty. I already put in my two cents with Roxanne. I wouldn't get any readers if I didn't appear on the few blogrolls I'm on either. So I am thankful for any bone that gets thrown my way. Whatever. And anyway, you hit it right on the head about the networking. That's how social groups work. That how civilations develop. It's a natural system. And by natural, I mean, human instinct. But that's a whole other topic.

Have you read any of Clancy at Culture Cat? She has a lot of interesting things to say on this topic.

[Lauren]

Ms. Q., "hasty" implies that I haven't considered the implications of removing the blogroll. Shelley wrote her post over a month ago and I've been thinking about what it means to play within a system I don't want to be a part of, hence the removal of list (not to mention my dial-up shit connection in which it became incredibly difficult to load my own damned webpage). In fact, I think some of the reactionary comments made about us as people are far more hasty than replacing a lengthy blogroll with a link to bloglines.

[Lauren]

And by the way, awesome redesign.

[Dylan]

It is unforunate that your decision had to be the catalyst for all this, Lauren, because I think it is an interesting and important conversation we could be having, important because it could really begin to change the way we look at linking and the hierarchy of the blogosphere.

That you have been outright attacked is absurd, even though I fall squarely in the pro-blogrolling camp. Fortunately, you are a person who is generous both with her blog (allowing people like me to pop on and write something from time to time) and with your links, so I'm pretty sure this will blow over.

I hope this doesn't, in the long run, leave you with a sour taste in your mouth, however.