Why do people read your blog? More specifically, why do people come to your blog page vs. reading your posts in a feed reader?

Conversely, why do you blog? Design should support your goals.

Are you building your “personal brand”? (I apologize for the b-word.) Perhaps more bio info for all the newbies who visit your site from search engines. If you’re like everyone else, that’s going to be more than half your traffic. Also, if this is your “home page,” you might make it easy to discover where else you live and interact on the net.

Effectively propagate memes of your choosing? Add sharing/repurposing tools. List a few of your favorite posts on themes you’re promoting.

Supporting your own memory? Maybe this-time-last-year links or related links from your archives.

Are you trying to promote your accessibility to your stakeholders at Harvard and potential clients? Maybe a more prominent contact-me form right on the home page. Post your public calendar (I export an excerpt of mine from Google).

***

Blogrolling is a vestige of when we handwrote the models of our social networks, at least the part that was on our blogs. There was also an element of reciprocity; hey, I’m on their blogroll, isn’t it polite to respond in kind? But we’re past that now, we’re in Weinberger’s “I no longer read your blog” era.

Assuming you still think a blogroll supports your design goals, how can we improve blogrolling?

Automation and integration. If you want to publish your buddy list, you probably have better tools to maintain your list (Outlook? AIM? Facebook? Your mobile phone’s address book?). Why maintain a separate list for your blog?

Prioritization. Not all links are equal. The value of a Doc Searls blogroll lies in its selectivity. These are the five blogs I read every day. These are the 12 people I trust implicitly. These four people are on my team and work with me.

Show more than a name. Blogroll as mini-aggregator? As long as you have a link to their blog, you could do what techmeme does with sponsored blogs, showing the latest title and the first sentence or two from those blogs. Again, selectivity rules.

Thanks for raising the subject. I’ve needed to think this through for a long time for my own blogs.

& this is part of my resistance to advice to take everything off my (yes, I know, excessive) sidebar, because “it distracts from your content” —

some of it *is* my content, and I *want* to send you elsewhere, to other blogs, to other interesting places.

That balance between creative ‘this is what I like’ expression and loading time is an ongoing struggle for me.

BTW, I came here from jeanene’s blog — and I’m a bit embarrassed to admit — I’ve never been here before…

Interesting-But-Not-An-Endorsement:
etc…

That would be nice if every person on my blogroll posted about the same thing all the time, always stayed in what I determined to be ‘their character’, never fell off or on the wagon, never got utterly pissed at another blogger, and remained garden-variety predictable over years or decades.

But interesting human beings aren’t predictable. For better and for worse. And bloggers double-aren’t predictable. No lexicon or qualifications of what I expect from them via hyperlinks can make them so. God bless us all.

Ditto on the objectivity thing.

I kept the blogroll at the old blog because it was something of a charming relic. I thought about deleting it or moving it elsewhere, but left it there because it was more like architecture than furniture.

Here in the new blog, with the flexibility that Wordpress affords, I have a lot more choice. Here the blogroll seems more like furniture. I think I can do something more “live” and interesting and, frankly, low-maintenance.

I like Jon’s inbox idea. I like Shelley’s idea about photos from a database rather than a widget that slows loading and serves as an ad for Flickr. (Though I do like Flickr and appreciate it a great deal.)

Anyway, thanks for all the ideas. Lot to chew on here.

“How about the last N links you posted - this would be a simple extract from your recent posts, like a constantly updating mini-blogroll.”

And I also like Jon’s ‘public inbox’ idea, a lot.

I have nothing against blogrolls; it’s the context of a link that matters. I have seen some blogrolls that are categorized… that seems like a good, simple way to have a blogroll and still CYA if readers perceive blogrolls more meaningful than the author intends.

Everyday Reads/Recommended:

Occasional/Recommended:

Interesting-But-Not-An-Endorsement:
etc…

Dean, there are currently 373 links on the front page of the old blog. That’s a lot of links. While 0.27 % of the page’s juice isn’t zero, it’s hardly a fatal loss.

Technorati counts each blog only one for ranking purposes. And it’s dying anyway (it’s important not to confuse any particular manifestion of power-imbalance with the problem itself - specific examples come and go, but the issue remains).

I was on that blogroll (thanks). It sent me maybe one or two readers a day. Again, all readers gratefully accepted, but that’s not going to make the difference between A-listery or not.

You have to use the right metrics - it’s a bad error to think that because you’ve used bad metrics and so gotten a nonsensical answer, therefore, the whole idea of metrics is invalid.

By the way, I believe having your own domain automatically increases your hits and referrals, since many web-spiders are fed with the list of domains. It doesn’t necessarily mean more human readers, just more robots.

My own blogroll is a way quickly click over to blogs of interest to me. Some are friends, some are people I don’t know but enjoy reading. Some are written by people holding opinions or ideas completely opposite of my own view, but are written well-enough, or hold enough insight or expression of a viewpoint that compels me to both keep it on my blogroll and want to share it with readers of the blogroll.

Discovering blogs of interest on the blogrolls of others extends the blogversation. That, in and of itself, creates added value in visiting the blogosphere.

Friends recommend books, music, movies . . . and bloggers recommend reading blogs. Is it an endorsement? Yes, and endorsement of reading, not a tacit approval or subscription to a point of view. I heartily recommend reading anything written by William Safire, although he and I are ideologically polar opposites.

And let me echo Tom Shugart’s comment (in Jeneane’s comment area on her blog discussing the blogroll issue), with a hat-tip to Seth Finklestein as well: if blogs are somehow rated or calculated in terms of “juice” or whatever by linkage, then you’ve just shot a whole bunch of people in the Technorati authority heart, and the Google Rank stomach.

I gave up on that and dropped all concern about such matters after my weblogs.com URL went away, and I slowly morphed from there to a short-lived faux blog, to buzzword.com (kudos, still, to Rogers Cadenhead, a mensch!) and finally to my own deanland.com. My Technorati juice dissolved, and yet my hits and referrals increased. So much for metrics.

Fact is, there is benefit in seeing what is on others’ blogrolls. There is also significance with regard to certain measures of SEO/SEM, Googlejuice, Technoratiness, and Ice Rocketitude. Or just plain buzz and ego to having a listing.

White space is pretty. Blogrolls are productive.

Find a design maven, consider what Frank does with his numerous rotating rolls, and bring back something that allows your readers to take a look at other blogs or sites of interest that you would care to share. It adds to the blogversation. And can be done without sacrificing ALL of the white space.

So, if “repetition succeeds” let me repeat what I said above. A blog is a public outbox (it replaces mass emails), why not accompany it with a public inbox on the side?

(Let’s face it, you can roll the clock back 10 years and someone could just have easily coined the term “poutbox” for public outbox — unrelated to public outhouse — at a critical juncture instead of “web log”…)

I haven’t done so myself because irregular Civilities readership is tiny, and as an essayist nobody petitions me for links.

When Ronni Bennett wrote about some of the groups on Facebook
http://www.timegoesby.net/weblog/2007/07/facebookhateboo.html, she said:
“…to allow hate speech aimed at any group without calling them out is is a lesson to them of our acceptance.”

and:
“As all advertisers know, repetition succeeds. The more an idea is repeated, the more acceptable it becomes.”

From Wikipedia:
“Social proof, also known as informational social influence, is a psychological phenomenon that occurs in ambiguous social situations when people are unable to determine the appropriate mode of behavior. Making the assumption that surrounding people possess more knowledge about the situation, they will deem the behavior of others as appropriate or better informed.”

I’m in favor of those in a position of trust taking responsibility for who and what they tell people to read. Not legal responsibility! But some level of personal, ethical, moral responsibility. Yes, I know that’s an unpopular and controversial position. And yes, this is an old argument that keeps popping up. It’s clear from this comment thread that there’s no easy or clear view on this, and I am far from objective.