I’ve been seriously thinking about ditching my blogroll link. It’s partially a technical issue, partially a personal one, and partially because I’m no longer sure that a blogroll is adding any value to the page.
Technical, because at one time I was using Bloglines as my primary feed reader, so my blogroll was also an up-to-date reflection of the feeds I was reading. I’ve since switched to Google Reader, but the way they implement feed sharing is different and makes sharing my current feed list a lot more annoying. Bloglines let me drop one snippet in and boom, my whole feed list was displayed, folders and all. Google does feed sharing differently — each folder is its own feed and needs its own snippet. That gives you more flexibility in how you share your feeds but it’s also extra work. Frankly it’s not all that much work (and I’d only have to set it up once), but I just can’t be bothered to do it.
In short, what you see in my blogroll is not fully in sync with what I’m currently reading. And silly as it may sound, that bugs me. I know every blogger has different ideas about what their blogroll should be, but for me it was always about sharing my own personal info stream. There’s any number of lists of the “top” blogs in any given category out there. My blogroll was meant to be more personal. Now that it’s not, I don’t like having it there as much.
Finally, I’m also not sure that anyone is actually finding value in a blogroll. When I look at web analytics reports (both for this blog and others), more and more of the referral traffic I see is coming in from Twitter and Facebook. Very little comes from other blogrolls. So there’s a part of me that’s thinking, “if nobody is using this, why not ditch it for stuff that people will find more useful or interesting?”
What do you think?
Kill it or keep it?
Is a blogroll still relevant anymore?
Am I overthinking the issue and need to go do something fun with my weekend?