Bye Blogroll

I just deleted the Blogroll from the site template. I doubt it will be missed.

The blogroll is a charming throwback to a time when the web consisted of individual sites like this one. We all linked to each other as a community trying out the new publishing medium of the World Wide Web. Came the RSS reader followed by the social network revolution and we’re all looking at Twitter or getting email newsletters from subscription supported sites.

And yes, most of the links in my now Blogroll turned out to links to shuttered or inactive sites. Even the mighty dangerousmeta!: is no longer updated.
Garret wrote in his last post:

Blogs, I found, are swiftly becoming broadcast-only devices. Discussions are spread out over Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Signal … and many other services. Often hard to predict where a person will choose to elucidate their blog postings.

Garret notes that there are some other ways to go- like writing a book, a form that seems to have survived a few centuries in spite of movies, TV and podcasting.

I’ve always described this blog as a “Personal Journal”. I have almost twenty years of intellectual exploration, hobbies and nonsense cached here. All searchable and available to anyone who cares to look. I’ve had more readers here than most pre-internet authors even though my writing has tended to somewhat obscure most of the time.

Maybe for sentimental reasons I treasure having an instant publishing platform, even if the readership amounts to a few dozen individuals.

One thought on “Bye Blogroll”

  1. garret says:

    There may be some hope for the future. Did you see this?

    http://alistapart.com/article/webmentions-enabling-better-communication-on-the-internet

    If it kickstarts meaningful convos again, I might reconsider.

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