Monday, August 01, 2011

Is the blogroll dead?

The estimable London blogger Diamond Geezer has written a post listing all the blogs that have him in their blogroll:
I'm duly honoured by each and every one of these blogroll links, so many thanks to you all. But I also notice that the list is 25% shorter than last year (which in turn was 20% shorter than the year before that) (which in turn was 20% shorter than the year before that). Ouch!

I compile this list every year, so I started by checking all 142 blogs on last year's list to see how many of them still linked here. As many as one in three have fallen by the wayside and don't appear this year, which is a heck of an attrition rate. Most of these are on hiatus (either deliberately, or through month-long neglect) which is a shame. A few have simply vanished off the face of the internet. Several big-hitters have removed their blogroll altogether, because blogrolls are so passé aren't they? And a few are still going strong but have thinned out their blogroll and I'm not on it, which I guess is the way it goes. Usually I can refresh my annual list with several new blogs, but this year there aren't many to find. My list is ever-shortening, and it's shortening ever quicker.

Because blogging is changing, shrinking, evolving. Fewer people blog these days because alternative platforms exist (and take far less effort to update). Blogrolls have become invisible and irrelevant to anyone subscribed via an RSS feed. The majority of fresh 2011 blogs have no blogroll at all, because that's the way templates look these days. Most importantly, new readers no longer come clicking via a long-standing blogroll in a sidebar, they arrive via a one-off reference on Twitter/Facebook/whatever.
Is the blogroll dead? I hope not. As I wrote in my How to be a Lib Dem Blogger chapter for Liberal Democrat Voice:
Keeping a blogroll is one of the pleasures of blogging. In the early days, when you are unlikely to have a lot of readers, it is a way of stating who you admire and what you want your blog to be like.

You don’t have to link to everyone who links to you. And not everyone you link to will link back to you in return. It is best not to get too bitter and twisted about this, though there is pleasure to be found in deleting the occasional person from your blogroll. It is a little like cutting them out of your will.
Diamond Geezer is right that blogrolls are less important than they used to be, but that only makes things more difficult for new bloggers.

And I have always disliked blogs that do not have a blogroll. The implication that people will land on your page and never want to go anywhere else on the Internet seems a little on the vainglorious side.

Of course there are other ways of linking - I have my own regular Six of the Best feature, whose title seems a little more embarrassing every time I run it - but linking remains the lifeblood of blogging. Perhaps having been writing for so many years I have an over-romantic view of the activity, but to me it should be reciprocal and collegiate as well as an attempt to dazzle the world with the brilliance of your writing.

As for social media, I love Twitter but have never quite seen the point of Facebook - at least if you already have a blog.

1 comment:

Jennie Rigg said...

Blog rolls are dying for two reasons:

1, Nobody looks at them. It's not just those who read via RSS reader; people blank them out when they are looking at a blog because it's advertising, and people are very good at advertising.

2, The way google indexes links means that blogroll links get counted as a new link every time someone posts. This is irritating if you track where your links come from.

I will quite often subscribe to a blog that I have found in your 6, or Caron's Corkers, or whomever else's link posts. I never click on blog rolls. I'll also go and check out the blog of someone who comments on my blog. So really, the best way for someone to break into blogging is the same as it ever was: comment on other people's blogs, and hope like hell you have something they are interested in reading on your blog when they click through. The more you interact with other bloggers, the more likely they are to notice you.