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ChinaHerald.net
Compiling these links (and many more) into Fons Tuinstra's blogroll takes a lot of work. Is it worth the effort? |
As the portal role of blogs and sites diminish, does the value of "blogrolls" (lists of handpicked links to recommended blogs) diminish as well?
This week my Chinese is celebrating the lunar New Year -- but I'm in Europe, where it is business as usual. So, finally I had some time for some long-overdue tasks like updating the blogroll on my weblog. I did this at the request of a few of my readers. They wrote they love to browse through my blogroll, but find the links there increasingly outdated or dead.
Last month a new blogger e-mailed to tell me how upset he was I had not yet added him to my blogroll after he'd been diligently blogging about China. Obviously, for some people those blogrolls still matter.
But while I was going through the list of links, I wondered whether updating my blogroll still made sense. In the early days of blogging, the blogroll would show your affiliations with other bloggers and -- at least as important -- would trigger an exchange of links that would improve your search engine ranking.
But this has changed, as the search engines have changed. Now, I mainly do my online reading via my RSS feed reader; I seldom visit blogs and sites via my Web browser. And when I do, I directly access links to entries that interest me. And I no longer check out blogrolls.
Are you still updating your blogrolls? Do you think it's useful?
I am a hypocrite: I read blogrolls, but rarely update...
