Keep Trying discusses the decline of the blogroll (thanks to InstaPundit for the link), and a commenter writes:
I think it has quite a bit to do with the relative lack of tools to deal with blogrolls. You have Blogrolling, which requires your page to call out to separate server and has a decidedly clunky interface; you also have Movable Type which has no interface for managing blogrolls whatsoever. Blogger, AFAIK doesn’t have any kind of integrated blogrolling either.
The notable exception to this being WordPress, which does have an exceptionally easy-to-use link management system. I suspect with the recent flap over MT3.0’s licensing we’ll see a lot of people moving over to WordPress and using its blogrolling system.
That and if you’re going to run Blogads, you either have to run a three-column design (which is often iffy design-wise), or accept that your blogroll will have to be pushed down the page.
That makes perfect sense to me — the Web has shown us that small differences in convenience can translate into big differences in the degree to which something is used. (The classic example is the clickable link vs. the link that you have to copy and paste.) I’m pleased to report, though, that PowerBlogs has a very nice blogroll maintenance feature.
Comments are closed.