A paradoxical truism is emerging in the blogosphere. The number of blogs is growing at a steady clip (there are now 112.8 million blogs tracked by Technorati) with little or no help from influential bloggers. Increasingly, bloggers are ditching their blogrolls (we too are senza blogroll).

Why?

For starters, within a blog roll of say 20 or so blogs, you are sure to find one or two stale ones, and a third that has been put on ice. Also, bloggers tend to look closely at their traffic. If they aren’t getting traffic from their friends, then their friends get the boot. Hey, it’s a tough world.

But most significantly, RSS feeds and search engine results factor so prominently in generating blog traffic that it seems like an anachronism to continue to display a list of blogs you admire. You can get much more mileage by liberally deep-linking to relevant blog posts.

I’ve been thinking about the demise of the blogroll for some time (even before we decided to cleave that feature on this here blog). Blogger Fons Tuinstra at China Herald has too. He posted a very thoughtful assessment on the demise of the blog roll. Fons too is wondering about the value of the blogroll. He writes:

The blogroll – originally the key tool to show your affiliations – has
lost lot of its original momentum. I cannot recall any instance in the
past year I have used a blogroll. Most of the entries come to me
through my rss-reader and I would never ever see most of the blogrolls.
Aggregators in different formats and search engines have taken over
that basic guidance if I’m looking for additional information, not the
blogroll.
But more traditional users of the weblog tell me they
still like to browse my blogroll, and other bloggers incidentally say
they are upset when they have not yet appeared yet after months of hard
online work. I hope both groups are happy now, although I have also
removed a few useless connections and they might be upset now.
Let me know, if you do not agree with my selections.

I’d put it in the category of nice to have, but certainly not crucial. I expect by this time next year, the blogroll will be on even fewer sites, a symbol of the old guard blogger hanging on to tradition wondering why there simply is no traffic coming from these lists.