Blogrolls as obsolete concept

Roll away.

Great party tonight here in Boston on the eve of BloggerCon. Met Betsy, Werner (whose birthday is today) and Glenn for the first times. Did the same earlier at lunch with Ed and Adam.

One conversation, repeated several times with different combinations of bloggers, comes down to this: old blogrolls have become a pain in the ass. All of us who have been blogging for awhile have lots of dead links in our ‘rolls, and frankly don’t even look at the things very much. Did once, maybe, but not any more.

So our ‘rolls are legacies. We maintain them for readers more than ourselves. Interesting, no?

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Seems to me that blogrolls made sense in a time before RSS aggregators. If you use other blogs and sites as triggers for your own writing, then a blogroll serves as a useful way to organize your surfing. When you shift to an aggregator driven strategy, your subscriptions file becomes the equivalent of your blogroll. Of course, your subscriptions file is invisible while your blogroll was public.