Community Chest

I have blogroll angst.  This isn’t some new angst that has snuck up on me.  It’s the same old angst, very similar to the angst related to "favorite links" pages in the good old days of "personal home pages".  Who do you link? Where do you link them? Why do you link them?  What happens if you decide not to link them? And, geez, why even bother with this madness?  I look at my blogroll and it’s either boring me to tears because it’s looked this way forever or I have left out someone who should be linked there or it’s just too darn unmanageable and messy and … angst.   

I thought that if I put "update blogroll" on my 101 things list I’d be able to let some of that angst go.  No more really stale blogroll, right?  Wrong.  I’ve updated it.  And updated it.  And updated it.  I got annoyed and pulled most of it down and put up links to the Blogher topic areas and the cute little Technorati favorite blogs widget.  I thought that would reduce my angst.  Nope, I think I have more angst about it. 

Along comes my hero, (and yours), Nancy White and she drops a mini bombshell… she’s thinking about getting rid of her blogroll completely! Wah! No! She can’t!  Umm wait, why can’t she?

Well she can’t because I often peruse her blogroll and find really interesting online community blogs that I either would never have found before or would have taken me time that I don’t have to search out – which means, I would never have found them because I’m too busy to do my own searching.  Nancy’s blogroll is my tool!  If it’s gone, I lose a valuable tool.  And, it’s all about me.  It’s also all about other people who I know use Nancy’s blogroll in much the same way.  It’s community building, darn it. 

But that’s really not enough of a reason, probably.  I don’t have the type of blogroll Nancy does but I do know a lot of people click the blogs on my blogroll.  I peek at the out clicks once a week and the "new discoveries" in particular get a lot of clicks.  If my new discoveries section disappeared, would I be participating actively in creating a community of bloggers?  Questions, questions, questions.

I’ve been asking myself some blogroll related questions and I posed them to Nancy.  She has replied so I’m going to answer the questions too.  I would love it if others who have blogroll angst could answer or could respond or could add your two cents.  If you have solved your blogroll issues, I’d love to hear your solution.  It may not work for me, but I’m interested anyway.  It’s my sort of "thing".

1) why do you have a blogroll? Duh, that’s what bloggers do!  That is exactly why I created a blogroll to start with.  It was very small, maybe 5 blogs that I adored and 5 links to other websites.  That was it.  But then, it grew.  Because I fell in love with more blogs and more bloggers.  I want people to look at my blog and see those blogs linked as an extension of me.  They are part of me, in some way.  A reflection of who I am and what is important or confusing or special to me.

2) what do you hope to gain or provide by having a blogroll and is that working for you?  I’ve gained a few things, I think, from the blogroll.  See that first part.  People can look at my blogroll (or they could before I ditched it in favor of technorati and blogher) and see something about me.  They could click away, to other blogs and I hope they would understand that those people are important to my life.  I learn from them, am entertained by them and sometimes worry over them.  The second part, that’s the tougher part.  Does anyone even look at blogrolls anymore?  Do you see my favorite blogs over there and see them as an extension of me or as important in my world?  Probably not.  And that’s the real problem.  They’re like banner ads or text ads or simply too darn big to really be useful.

3) why are you thinking about doing away with it?  Too big.  Too unmanageable.  Or not inclusive enough or simply not worth the space they are taking up because people don’t seem to really look at them anymore.

4) what would you do instead? (if anything) That’s the thing – I don’t know.  Nancy mentions linking to faves in blog entries and I’m all for that but who has time?  And, it’s sooo easy to write a blog, link to one of the same 6 bloggers over and over and over again.  I don’t want to fall into that sort of a trap.  I also don’t want to leave my favorite, top 6, out.  Ya know?  (I’m interested in Grazr.  It’s been on my list of things to look at but haven’t.  I’ve considered sticking my feed link up there but I don’t think enough people are interested in clicking those at this point.  Too many people don’t even understand what RSS is much less have a reader…)

5) you care about community and providing link love, I know you do, so how can you let go of that blogroll and still provide the love?  See the first answers to figure this one out.  The blogroll is all about community for me.  I link to those I love, or hate (but learn from) or need in my life everyday.  Nancy wants to know if blogs do a good job with community through blogrolling.  See my intro – Nancy’s blogroll did the job for me.  She gave link love and I certainly clicked and I subscribed to more of her blogrolled blogs than I can begin to count. My new discoveries section gets a lot of clicks.  Are those clicks community indicators? Or are they something else?  We don’t really know, because we don’t usually know if the circle is somehow completed or somehow expanded.  It feels to me like they are and it is.    The blogroll is probably not the BEST community building tool, I have to agree.  But what’s better? What other options are there? Do you throw the blogroll out with the bath water? 

I just don’t know.  Do you?

Technorati Tags: blogrolls, blogging, linklove, community, blogcommunity