Thursday, September 13, 2007

The "weeding out my blogroll" meme

I noticed in the last few days that the Friendly Ghost and Gerry McCusker both posted about dropping blogs from their blogrolls, FG because he thought it was a cheap way to get included in other peoples' statistics and Gerry, if I understood him right, because other people hadn't linked to his blog. This got me to thinking about why I spent so much time working on my blogroll last summer (beyond pure procrastination).

Last year Mike Sansone described a number of purposes for a blogroll: listing others who are part of your community, indicating commonality, extending your conversation outward. "Let your blogroll be a benefit to your audience," he suggests. I do recall when I first started reading blogs, whenever I found one I liked I always clicked through the blogroll in hopes of finding others I liked. Certainly a benefit.

On reflection, I'd say my blogroll has a number of different purposes, but it's mostly geared toward students (mine and others, maybe those at schools where social media isn't being taught yet). The PR pros section highlights blogs I think students can especially benefit from reading. The New Voices section introduces them to blogs written by students and other young PRs--but I also want to promote the ones who aren't well-known in the blogosphere (yet). The educators section is more for the community-building side of things... there aren't very many of us. And the Grady Blog Dawgs section highlights other Grady faculty who are blogging -- some of the alumni who read my blog might be interested in these as well.

The problem is in keeping it updated -- so many times I've added a blog's RSS feed to my aggregator but forgotten to add it to my blogroll; Constantin's failure to update the PR list that I depend on to find new blogs; not deleting a link to someone who's not posting anymore. (You notice how I slipped in that it's really all Constantin's fault.) But it doesn't "benefit my readers" if it's not up-to-date. Maybe Friendly and Gerry will ignite a "weeding out my blogroll" meme!

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Comments:
Apologies for the delay in updating the PR Blogs List :(. Hopefully I'm going to be able to do that this weekend (I know, promises....).

But you don't have to wait for the updates in order to find new blogs. You can just take a look at my del.icio.us "prblogs" tag or subscribe to its RSS feed to get new blogs as soon as I find about them.
 
Oh, great, now it's back on me. I should've known you'd have it under control. :)
 
Now there's even easier to get new updates - just subscribe to:
http://twitter.com/NewPRBlogs

Thank you for giving me the idea! :)
 
Okay, great-- now I have only myself to blame. Thanks, though; I have subscribed on Twitter. :)
 
Not quite right, Karen. I dropped some blogs as I felt their content wasn't working for me and that they showed no interest in what I blogged on. I don't want scores of blog credits, rather go more discerning. So less churlish, more discriminatory. Ta
 
Thanks for the clarification, Gerry, I wasn't entirely sure what you meant by "never felt the love," but it sounded like a reference to "link love." Anyway, I do wish more people WOULD pay attention to their blog rolls as they often seem out of date!
 
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