Dean has a very good post about blogrolling, and blogging in general. In the post, he discusses how and why bloggers ‘buy’ readers through linking and blogrolling. I’ve recently trimmed my own blogroll because it was getting too long, and because I’ve started using a newsreader. So most of the blogs that have RSS feeds have been removed from my blogroll and put into the newsreader. A root question here is who is the blogroll for; the blog owner or the blog’s readers? I tend to lean towards the idea that it’s for me, the blog owner, to manage my reading. Yet I still want to highlight blogs that I like. But I’m not convinced that a long blogroll is the best way to accomplish that. I’ve been toying with the idea of having a ‘core’ blogroll, which contains my favorite blogs, and also having a list of ‘blogs I read’ on a separate page. I think this may be a good solution because I can also list the blogs that I subscribe to in my newsreader.
And while I’m talking about this, I recently had a discussion with my brother about linking etiquette. That is, whether it’s better to blogroll someone, or to put a ‘real’ link on your site. I think a ‘real’ link is better if only because Technorati doesn’t recognize links within blogrolls. So I’ve been putting duplicate, invisible links on my site just for Technorati. (There has to be an easier way!)