Blogging Is Socializing
April 28th, 2008 | by ScottIt appears that you're new here, if you like what you read, please subscribe to the news feed or sign up for the Leap eTips news and updates email list. Thank you for visiting :)
After seeing that Chris Brogan had officially declared today as “Read and Comment” day, urging bloggers to spend a little time today to discover and participate in conversations on other blogs than their own–it struck me that most popular blogs these days (and unpopular blogs like my own) are missing the most basic social element of a blog…the Blogroll. In fact, of all the blogs I follow on a daily basis, less that 10% have blogrolls available.
Sure, over time blogrolls have been abused by some and politicized by many, Darren of ProBlogger.net even touched on that problem yesterday; but if blogs are really all about the conversations then it seems to me that it’s not only natural to have a blogroll for sharing similar sites and blogs holding interesting conversations, but should almost be expected.
Look at it like this, when a friend asks my advise on any topic I’m happy to share what I know with them, and if I know of any additional resources that I think they should look over I’d be a bad friend to not share those, wouldn’t I?
It’s the same thing with blogging. Whatever the topic of our blogs are, none of us are all knowing, and most of us follow similar blogs to our own in order to stay current.
Those are additional resources we should, as good friends to our readers, be sharing on blogrolls.
So, in addition to commenting on a few other blogs today (something I do every day anyway), I’m adding the blogroll back to this blog. I’m going to add some of the sites I follow regularly because if you find anything of value on my crappy blog, I’m sure you’ll find treasures of information on those.
Stumble It!
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2 Responses to “Blogging Is Socializing”
By Web Design Blog on Apr 29, 2008 | Reply
This is a very good point. I think it’s also handy to have a blogroll on your site to keep a track of all the sites you visit on a regular basis.
Although I don’t use this for that purpose on my site at the moment, I think I will need to soon as there are lots of blogs I visit but can never keep track of them.
By Scott on Apr 29, 2008 | Reply
I wouldn’t really use a blogroll to track the sites and blogs I follow regularly because there’s so many of them. I use bloglines to stay current with blogs I follow, and have about 50 (correction, just checked and there’s 127) in there right now. It’s crazy.
But that would make a blogroll way too long. Instead, I think it’s the perfect place though to mention similar sites and exceptional resources, at least that’s how I intend to use it.