To blogroll or not to blogroll... and why Alex has redone his site and explains why (to himself :o) here, leaving aside the change to WordPress (am thinking of scuttling off there myself soonish... possibly) and the textured background (retro web... like it!) has decided, as Will did a bit back, to scrap the blogroll in favour of a Bloglines aggregator list as:
"The thing is, bloggers expect all the little buttons and whistles, but those who are not hard-core bloggers find them to be extraneous and confusing ..." [Alex Halavais]
Personally I reckon that the more hardcore among us are actually the ones that don't need a blogroll... heck we never even visit each others sites anyway, just our feeds... and that for the new visitor they offer a simple and effective 'neighborhood' and context. Admittedly blogrolls are often out of date, unstructured and not by any means true reflections of a personal blogosphere (OK OK you can get plenty of tools to do this, but on the whole people just don't, do they?) and listing all the people you read is often impractical if your average blogger subscribes to 130 odd newsfeeds through their aggregator (well, your average feeds.scripting.com participant - I've totally lost the source for this data... anyone help me out here?) but they do seem to offer something and that, I reckon, is social glue and not just in the 'linky goodness' sense (which Alex retains, invisibly :o)
You see, a true reflection of the blogosphere is only really to be had through an understanding of who reads who. Yes, there's an 'active network' or writers referencing each other (as I have here) but that reflects, I reckon, an ever increasing 'tip' of the social iceberg that webpublishing is developing... especially if we are to count the (also by my reckoning) increasing number of readers who are not webpublishing! There is value in links... but that value is limited and increasingly focussed... I mean, why do I blogroll people? Initially for me it was as a means of entering a social group and acknowledging / respecting those I respect and who, I, in turn would like to be acknowledged by. While most of my references to individuals in this blog are in relation to ideas / thoughts that I react to or develop on, I also, frequently, link to people out of acknowledgment. Who I read is 'unclouded' (to a degree :o) and appropriate... I haven't updated my blogroll in over half a year... check my subscription list at Bloglines and you'll be getting somewhere, I update that on an almost daily basis!
And here is where we lie, here is the problem and here is where there is a revolution waiting to happen. Bloglines is an amazing operation and here is a way that we are able to get a slice of the 'who's reading who' pie (I'd imagine this is going to rocket, technorati style, sometime soon too!) but they can only cover who uses them. Put simply, the one greatest failing of RSS is that it leaves us unable to socially connect... Winer's share your opml project and the Bloglines facility are all well and good but the technology simply doesn't allow it and that leaves us between a rock (Blogrolls) and a hard place (Who I Read).
No real conclusion to this long rambling one but, in my perfect webpublishing system for your institutional / organisational deployment a bloglines-esque public, indexable and open system which gives a true map of your social / operational communication networks from a readership (as well as a referenced) objective is an absolute must.
Can't see it ever happening on the web though...
12:00:36 PM 
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