For anyone visiting a blog will notice on most of them a list of other blogs usually located in the sidebar area of the blog they are visiting. For blog owners this is where you would typically list a mish mash of other blogs you read on a daily basis. However as Lorelle VanFossen on Blog Herald rightly noted today blogrolls have lost much of the usefulness they were intended to have.

Lorelle notes that in the beginning the expectation was that these blogrolls could lead you to further rich resources of like minded blogger; or at least ones that could be considered a valuable resource. Lately however she says:

Unfortunately, too many blogrolls became link exchanges which felt commercial (link to me and I’ll link to you), or hodge podge collections of whatever caught the blogger’s eye when putting together their blogroll. Over the years, the blogroll has lost a lot of its importance, as readers, who like digging through related content more than scrounging, got burned with badly organized and sponsored blogrolls.

When I first started out blogging I got caught up sad to say in some of the blogrolls that were nothing more than directories of blogs who might; or might not, be aligned with the same common theme your blog followed. However after awhile I noticed that they were really nothing more than space wasters that really didn’t provide any value for space given either for myself; or for my readers so I discontinued using them.

Then one day I was reading one of my favorite bloggers; whose name escapes me at the moment (fer shame), and they were talking about their personal A-List of bloggers that they followed. This was during one of those always recurring flare ups over the value of the Technorati A-List and then I realized that this was the true value of what a conscientiously maintained blogroll - it is our own personal A-List of bloggers not some free advertising space for blogs we may never even read.

Realizing this I then set about going through my current feed reading list and picking out the bloggers who have; and continue to have, an impact on what I think about or inspire me to write about ideas they have posted about. What this resulted in is the list in the sidebar to the right called My A-List of Bloggers and if stats are any indicator others who visit here make good use of the list.

As Lorelle says … it is time to bring back the power of the blogroll. To which O would add this - ignore all those so-called blogroll directories out there. Go through your reading list and pick out the best of the ones that make you think - those are the one’s I want to visit not some prefabricated listing.

On a side note to Blog Herald - I tried to leave much of this as a comment to Lorelle’s post but for the second time in a row when I tried to post the comment I kept getting thrown to an error page with a list of errors and the such so I had to resort to posting my reply to her post as a post of my own.

Listening to: Bjorn Lynne - Beneath Another Sky - Secret World

Conversation Tags: blogging, blogrolls, A-List, Blog Herald, Lorelle VanFossen