I Am Looking For The Crest Of A New Wave

Catherine redesigned her blog and got rid of her blogroll. Reading her explanation I feel like I’ve glimpsed web3.0.

i actually never use blogrolls anymore. i feel like they’re semi-obsolete for reasons i can’t articulate. maybe just because people link so much to other blog posts within their blog posts, and that counts more as an endorsement of ‘you should be reading this blog’ than a blogroll spot.

Seems to me like she did a pretty good job of articulating it. Blogrolls serve less as an endorsement of a given blog than a way of establishing tribal identity. They say, My blog’s focus and style draw from/is inspired by/is interested in (dialectic-style) these other blogs as well. But that’s just declaratory — a statement of what I’d like my blog to identify with. A more truthful demonstration of what it actually does identify with comes from, as Catherine says, what I link to and what links to me. I have This Is 50 on my blogroll, for instance, and I download a bunch of stuff from there and waste time there on occasion, but you’ll very rarely see me link to This Is 50. Should it be on the blogroll? Is there utility for a reader in seeing what a blogger says s/he recommends, vice following the actual-presented links in a series of posts? Or are blogrolls obsolete, a vestige and a tradition of an outmoded internet era?