Blogrolling On

Maintaining blogrolls (list of links to blogs) is a well-known pain-in-the-arse. The problem is we don't have much motivation besides the pride of a well-crafted blog, your interests change, the URLs and even the names of blogs change. The one list active bloggers maintain is their subscriptions and its the one of highest value -- each subscription is a time commitment to someone, the clearest indicator of a relationship. When I blogged on Radio I took advantage of Jon Udell's channel roll to share my subscriptions as a blogroll alongside a blogroll was of the members of the Blog-Network. Maintaining the Blog-Network is a chore beyond me at this point and it seems to continue to serve a purpose on its own, but its time for me to provide a blogroll representative of my interests and relationships.

So at the bottom of the left margin you will find a blogroll. Posting it made simple by importing my OPML file into Blogrolling.com. Now I just have to get into the habit of renaming subscriptions from the wacky neologism people come up with for their blogs into their names within NetNewsWire. But that's a metadata and cultural issue I really don't want to get into.

The interesting thing is my subscription count hovers around 150. That magical number.

Comments

[Liz]

Ross, I don't think it's true that in general, RSS subscriptions are the "key indicator" for bloggers.

My sense is still that aggregator use is by a fairly small minority of the weblogging population.

I know there's been some discussion on this somewhere recently. Not sure if it was M2M or not...

[Ross Mayfield]

Liz previously commented on aggregators on M2M: http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2003/11/02/comments_aggregators_and_broadcast_models.php

I don't have access to stats about aggregator adoption. I do think that if someone subscribes to a blog its a stronger directional tie than linking to them on their blog. Something for a post on M2M another day.

[Oliver Thylmann]

I can only suggest Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com). It's a web based RSS reader, and as a side effect you can publish your reading list (or all that you do not mark private) via a simple javascript on your site. My reading list is on the right side of http://ennead.de/blog/ and it is always up to date.