I disagree. Why should other bloggers have the authority to place obligations on a blog owner of what they should do w/their space? Even in the name of "a cause." Peer pressure and strong-arming in the blogosphere is not the way to retain contributors to a cause.

I tend to agree with you, Krista. I think the blogroll establishes, for each blog, a visual indicator of the kind of network that a persons blog wishes to ally themselves with. While this certainly could have an element of high school clique-ishness to it, its positives outweigh its negatives.

Of course I read Instapundit, and Andrew Sullivan, and Atrios, and Kos... but I don't to link to them because I don't have to... People are going to find them. The point of my blogroll is to highlight people that I believe should have more exposure than they do, no matter how much exposure they have on their own.

Blogrolls are an important tool for us, and it would be a shame to see a movement doing away with them.

I don't think there's any danger of doing away with them, Dylan. Most people are too interested in being read to alienate themselves by removing the blogroll. While it's obviously a helpful referential tool, if 95% of blogland is running a blogroll, those who choose to discontinue it shouldn't be held culpable for the imagined breakdown of communication in the blogosphere.

Who would have thought that so many people would suddenly ditch trackback a few months ago? But it happened, and trackbacks were an entrenched social institution — albeit less well-understood than blogrolls.

I lost my blogroll some time ago (though like Lauren's, it's still sort-of available as a link to my public Bloglines subscriptions -- and before you ask, all but my ego-searches are public). I did it because I had it made crystal-clear to me that blogrolls (and, more specifically, the act of removing someone from a blogroll) can exert a style of social control that I just don't want any part of.

I'm not sure we should discuss the social positives of blogrolls without also discussing the social negatives.

I agree with Dorothea and that was precisely my rationale for omitting it when I changed my blog.

I don't know, Krista... The trackback comparison is a bit of a red herring. Trackbacks have diminished mostly because they've been rendered obsolete by tools like Technorati and news aggregators which basically everyone uses now. I'm not sure that 6 months ago you could have said that. Of course, news aggregators raise a whole different level of issues, but that isn't the conversation here.

The blogroll will only become obsolete if it is replaced by some sort of publicly viewable and widely visited list of what blogs a given person has in their aggregator. I'm not sure I want that, as a certain degree of anonymity is taken away.

And while I agree that blogrolls are in no real danger of being eliminated, it would simply be a shame to see a broadly sweeping movement of people who would otherwise contribute quite a bit to the exposure of smaller and interesting voices essentially saying that they don't like the way the game is played, so they are taking their ball and going home.

By the way, does anyone find this interesting that this has largely been a discussion among female blogs? I'm making no qualitative judgement on this, but I wonder if there might be a reason.

Possibly because more female bloggers have been burned by this, no matter which side of it they're on?

I’m familiar with the Technorati/aggregator argument re trackbacks, but I just can’t bring myself to buy it. Technorati is wildly inaccurate — when I check my site there, it fails to list probably a good third of links I know exist. And aggregators only work while the conversation is question is going on. When I go back six months or a year later to find things for research, it's easy to follow a web of trackbacks. Aggregators don’t help me then, unless there’s a function I’m not aware of. (If so, please tell me. It’ll be a huge help.) For me, trackbacks were/are a huge factor in blog intertextuality, and were also a big help in thinking about sociality and networks.

I completely agree with you on that front, Krista. I wish trackbacks were better utilized, and were utilized more often. My point in bringing up the aggregator was merely to say that, because the aggregator can keep up with such large amounts of text, I would say that most people find many of the links to their blogs through the aggregator itself.

And, yes, Technorati is massively deficient, as is the Ecosystem and, for that matter, Google.

In the post that I tracked-back to this one, I mentioned that the problem, really, is an inability to weight quality links (those in which someone links to a blogger because they wrote something which they want to respond to) and quantity of links (as are found on many blogrolls). I'm not a programmer, but it seems to me that trackbacks are a good way to indicate the quality of a link. I linked to your post about this subject, and it (among others) inspired me to write on my own blog. As a result, I sent you a trackback. If there was a software tool which could count trackbacks and weight them higher than other, more permanent links, we'd be on our way.

This, of course, brings up obvious "gaming the system" issues, and would result in much more trackback spam, but we have those problems with links already. At least we'd be able to begin counting quality links.

I dunno... I'm rambling a bit, but I think this conversation on your blog and the others that it has been discussed on might mark the beginning of an evolutionary shift in the way we think about the blogging network. That is why I'm interested in why this has been discussed, for the most part, on female written blogs. But, if we could find a way to do this effectively, it would affect all blogs in a positive way, not the least of which would be the overlooked female bloggers.

I'm fascinated by this discussion, so let me know if I'm boring you! :)

BTW, to Michelle and Dorothea - I didn’t mean to imply that you (or anyone specific, although I can see how Lauren might not buy that) are evil for not maintaining a blogroll. You’re certainly free to run your blog as you see fit, and I respect your reasoning. (However, I am free to comment on it, as Michelle has continuously commented unfavorably on my Redhead Project.) My reason for writing the post stemmed from the fact that when Burningbird says something a fair amount of people generally follow suit, and I would really hate to see de-blogrolling become a trend.

Dylan - No, you’re not boring me at all. I’m particularly interested in the bit about “might mark the beginning of an evolutionary shift in the way we think about the blogging network.” Expound, please?

Cindy has now pointed out to me that Shelley was advocating for deblogrolling in general and I do not agree with that any more than I agree with other bloggers advising others to maintain one. It's the assumption that anyone knows "best" to advise the blogworld at large that I find utterly preposterous and offensive.

And I think that some of these fears may be founded in the narrowness of the viewing of the blogging community. For example, you fear that people will follow Shelley's example and blow out the blogrolls. I won't. I'm a blogger and I chose to ditch it for my own reasons. If I had a blogroll now, though, I wouldn't suddenly delete it just because someone else advocated it. There is a whole 'nother big blog world out there beyond the scope of Shelley's readers. To imply that one person has that much control really negates the existence and rationality of the rest of us. I felt that somewhat with Dylan's comment about everyone using Technorati. Not me. I don't use it. Why does he think that basically "everyone" does? (That's just a sidepoint, really. I'm not trying to dicker with Dylan, just trying to provide an example.)

And to clear any smudge on my commenting, you must admit that I have commented favorably on your Redheaded Series at times as well. You know I have, you crazy redhead, you. ;)

Happy to be used as an example, Michelle.

I also said that Technorati was massively deficient, however, so even if EVERYONE were actually using it they would be using a tool which doesn't really do the job it should.