The demise of blogrolls? You can thank RSS
Duncan Riley asks an interesting question on The Inquisitr: what ever happened to blogrolls?
If you’ve been in or around the blogging game for awhile, you’ll understand what this question means. Blogrolls – a hand selected list of websites prominently displayed on a blog under some sort of “Blog Roll” or “Sites I Visit, You Should Too” heading – used to be pretty popular. They were a way for sites and publishers to further identify themselves. A liberal politics blog might have MyDD but certainly not have Powerline on its blogroll, for instance. Blogrolls were a way to extend respect and even some permanent link love to fellow bloggers as well. And of course the hope was that people will visit the sites that you blog rolled, increasing influence and popularity all around.
In thinking about how to answer Duncan’s question, I thought about how I used to use blogrolls. In fact, I realized, I used my own personal blogroll as a way to remember to visit the sites I enjoyed. It was a collection of bookmarks, essentially, that I had collected and published to my own website.
Then I thought about why I don’t need to do that anymore: RSS. RSS feeds allow me the luxury of housing all of the websites I enjoy in one place, while nicely keeping track of the stories I’ve already looked at and the ones I have not as yet. By subscribing to an RSS feed, I’m in a way extending some of the same respect that I used to in the past by including a link as part of a blogroll. And if publishers so desire, they can even include advertising as part of RSS feeds as a way to help pay some bills.
There are other reasons why blogrolls aren’t as popular these days. The rise of widgets and the greatly increased focus on jamming ads into every nook and cranny likely have had a role in squeezing out blogroll real estate.
But I do think that the rise of RSS has helped to contribute to the demise of blogrolls.
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