I don't usually engage in heated flames but this post from Shelley Powers was too much to resist not replying to. During a rant about the dominance of white males in the blogging community, Shelley encouraged bloggers to remove their blogroll because they "are hurting us", The main reason that she gave was that blogrolls are useless and they are do nothing to help less known good bloggers get into the top 100 list at Technorati.

I find it totally absurd to come to the conclusion that blogrolls should be removed because of Technorati's way of determining popular blogs. Blogrolls have a variety of purposes and even if you don't personally use them it doesn't mean that your visitors don't. For instance I start out by checking the blogroll when I visit a new blog trying to identify blogs that I frequent to check whether I share the notion of a good read with the blog writer. A blogroll is the key element in developing blog friend circles which are the heart of the social aspect of blogging. By blogrolling a site you are essentially proclaiming that you like the content of the site and therefore to a greater or lesser extent the site has something to do with yours. This is a great way to identify blogs of similar interests and maybe start forming part of a circle of blog friends with the same interests. To a certain extent this functions similar to webrings but with control on which site you visit. This is the time were the name of your blog matters the most because people will click on it based on its name.

One of the things that escaped Ms Shelley was the encouragement a newbie blogger gets when he's blogrolled for the first time. In a time were blogging has become so common and getting some recognition is even more difficult new bloggers need to be encouraged to continue blogging, and what's better than knowing that somebody values enough to add it to his reading list.

Although I'm all out in favor of blogrolls I realize that they are no holy grail. For instance, long blogrolls are much less useful than shorter ones which attract more attention and are more readable. Blogrolls must also be maintained updated to reflect the shift in the owner's readership, something not all bloggers do. Furthermore a new phenomenon that can threaten the validity of blogrolls is the link exchange systems that allow bloggers to exchange links on their blogrolls. As long as both bloggers in the exchange like each other's blogs then there's no harm in facilitating links but once you start linking for the sake of the link the scope of the blogroll is lost. Separating sites referenced through link exchanges into a different blogroll category might be a valid compromise because people are warned that the blogroll is for a specific reason and might not necessarily be for the sake of content.

One thing I agree with Shelley is that the top 100 list in Technorati is completely useless to identify new good blogs, however I don't think this is the purpose of the list in the first place. I think being on the top 100 list serves more as a status symbol for your blog than anything else. Technorati isn't only blogging service around and there are many other services that do a great job of promoting good newer blogs, like blog explosion for example.

Removing blogrolls to defect Tecnorati's and NZ Bear's Ecosystem top blog list is just the tip of the iceberg in destroying several other blogging services which rely on blogrolls for their analysis. I'm not going into a discussion on whether the use of blogrolls are adequate for such analysis because that's another issue but you cannot chop down a forest to kill a weed. For one thing blogrolls are the backbone of Blogshares, and depriving me from this addiction by shooting down blogrolls deserves capital punishment.

Some other articles about the same topic as this are:-

• Thinking with my fingers
• Rox Populi
• Bitch Phd
• Feministe