This might be true for large blogs, such as yourself. You have large readership already and really don’t actually need the help of other blogs to draw attention to yourself. People know to just go to firedoglake or other things. For small bloggers, like myself, it becomes almost a trade off…basically “you blogroll me I’ll blogroll you” – for a lot of small time bloggers, this becomes an important way of working together to build a community of bloggers, a way to get the word out. I think they are more effective for small bloggers.

Also, when I find a new blog and I’m not initially sure whether I can trust it or not, I will look to the blogrolls of blogs I trust. If it is there, then I give it a shot. If not, perhaps I’ll bypass it.

Will all that said, blog plug time – http://joshuetree.blogspot.com/

I personally use bogrolls every time I go…

See Also: “The Rise of RSS versus bookmarks” or “Wait, you have a blogroll?”

The sticky thing is, how do you show the influences you don’t generally cite directly without either creating a ghetto for them or listing them alongside things that it’s redundant to list? A blogroll suggests that the listed blogs are equivalent, so in your case all the attention you shower on Glen Greenwald is also a compliment to The Internet Food Association, and the ACLU is just as important as the Washington Independent. Catherine’s decision is just going to lead to a lot of stress as she tries to juggle paying just the right amounts of attention to politipunks v. bikes v. random fuzzy things v. personal stress.

I look to blogrolls to find blogs I might not know about, recommended by people whose blogging I respect. I like cresting waves but I’m not ready for washing away the blogrolls just yet.

I never use blogrolls (or I haven’t in the last 4 years or so) and in fact find them annoying because they’re usually so large they slow down pageloads. I would much rather have people I read regularly (this includes you) mention other blogs they like (and why), so I can add said blogs to my feed.

I think (getting into Web 3.0 (and Twitter)) that blogs and the like are basically a text medium, so a premium should be placed on the delivery of the text itself, rather than the gadgetry. This seems obvious to me, because I’ve got 222 feeds at the moment, so I couldn’t keep up with them all if I tried, but I do try, and sites that load quickest and make it the easiest to comment are the ones that tend to draw reponses. Obviously, people want the multimedia experience in posts, and similarly there are the neccessary ads, both ads proper and links to the official circle (such as other FDL bloggers in your case). Everything else: get rid of it.

Of course, someone will argue that if you load a bunch of stuff on your page more people will visit, but again, if it takes too long to load (or it blows up my browser), I will delay visiting in favor of other pages that don’t give me such problems. It’s easy to read unfogged blog posts, even if I don’t have time to wade through the comments section, and it’s harder to visit DeLong’s blog (because he has all this crap on the page), so I don’t comment much on DeLong’s blog and will often comment on unfogged even though reading the threads takes lots of time. Collective action! If everybody did it, there would be more time for actually reading the blogs and/or commenting, which means more page hits for everybody (and their ads)!

If you see what I mean.

max
[’But the lure of bandwidth-eating always wins.’]

what mmb said

What, is it time for the next great blogroll purge already?

How do you think I found you?

I don’t like blogs who don’t have blogrolls. Big etiquette failure. Every time I go to Open Left, one of whose founders is my friend, I get angry seeing they don’t have a blog roll.

But my take is simpler: if you don’t have a blogroll, don’t expect links on other people’s blogrolls. It’s not even about reciprocity, when I’ve been in charge of blogrolls I’ve blogrolled people who didn’t blogroll me, but I don’t like blogrolling people who blogroll no one.

I like to see what a blogger also reads, even if they don’t link/quote from it. But lengthy blogrolls usually aren’t a reflection of what the blogger in question actually reads regularly.

I also think it’s nice that bloggers have interests in different spheres (helps to see the more whole person), but then the blogroll should have subdivisions instead of just one mashup.

I do think an annual/semi-annual purging of blogroll items is good idea, and just linking to something because they are friends or have mojo is kind of a turnoff.

Maybe all blogrolls should have a footnote explaining their own philosophy of why they choose their items would also be helpful.