I have been thinking for a little while now that something needs to change in the practice of blogrolling. People use a lengthy blogroll to indicate what other blogs they consider interesting (telling something about their own interests) and to encourage others to link to them, but what use are they to the rest of the people actually reading the weblogs themselves? “BlogRolling”:http://www.blogrolling.com/members.phtml’s practice of just listing them all in a column without comment seems to me particularly pointless – who is going to go and look through all the blogs on someone’s list of 50 – a mix of friends and work colleagues and random interesting stuff – on the off chance that some of them will be interesting?
That’s why I have a “single link”:http://www.bloglines.com/public/derb/ on my already over-crowded right hand bar which leads you to the 104 weblogs I am currently tracking, all sorted into categories and sometimes even with descriptions thanks to “bloglines”:http://www.bloglines.com/. But I worry that automated tools that measure my connectedness like “Technorati”:http://www.technorati.com/ will not capture this and visitors may overlook the link.
So do I include a long useless list of links somewhere just so robots can read them? What do you think? Is there a better way to tackle this? Could bloglines and the blog indexing/ratings people get together somehow?
