September 14, 2007

You Know How I Feel About Blogrolls

An interesting discussion is going on at Doc's on blogrolls. My latest comment is here.

Disclaimer: I AM A LONG TIME FAN OF THE BLOGROLL.

I think if people have too hard of a time keeping up with what the folks on their blogrolls are writing, then:

1) who cares. there's no law mandating that I read the people on my blogroll every day, every week, or even every year. my blogroll will be more useful to me and others if I do, yes. but maybe i like someone's blog but they only posted once. guess what: i can put it on my blogroll. maybe i loved that post. so what if that person writes crap six months out of the year, but maybe they shit out a jewel every May. Maybe I love their jewel. maybe i love them. maybe i hate them but love the way they write. maybe i love them but hate the way they write. I can blogroll whoever I want. A link to a blog is not my endorsement of every post. My link says, well lookie there. Stay out of my blogroll methodology. make me a bumpersticker: keep your rules off my blogroll.

2) shut up. if you don't ever get time to click through your blogroll, you could try shutting up for a week and only reading. It isn't that hard. Maybe all of us should shut up and only read/comment for one week each month. I'd rather see that then plain paper pages with plenty of whitespace cluttering the Web and sending me no-where fast.

3) add new voices. if you aren't keeping up, you might be bored with the people on your blogroll. add new voices then. blogrolling.com has 1-click adding. Use your technorati faves to fuel your blogroll. That is saying: "hey, something made my heart go boom-boom a little bit." You are afraid of being a gatekeeper. White space is gate keeping too, pa. It's a fence around your posts. It's opting out of doing the right thing because the right thing takes too long. Bullocks. Fund a startup and solve the problem.

Blogs are not magazines. Fuck white space. Long live the Blogroll.

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