I have been meaning to write this post for a long time now, and it wasn’t until a post by Darren Barefoot (a bunch of Darren links today) that I decided to unleash my thoughts.

When I first began blogging after the new year in 2004, the gold standard or currency of blogging, was links and appearing on a blog’s blogroll. Today, links are still the currency of all bloggers, but blogrolls are beginning to slowly fade away. Blogrolling.com was the only simple application of its time, and nearly every blogger had it on their sidebar. To be on a sidebar was the best of vanity items, and the more blogrolls you appeared on the better. I spent months trying to get on the blogrolls of everyone in my niche of parenting blogs. Some say to the point of being a blog whore and for that I am truly guilty.

I still try to get linked by bloggers on their blogrolls, but it is beginning to be a thing of the past. My personal site, Genuine, still ranks as the 75th most linked to site of the members of blogrolling.com, a spot it has had since the beginning of the Blogrolling Hot 500. I am not sure they update this list as I have had the same 388 links for months now. Even their management of the site and this list seems to be waning.

The reason for its demise is RSS aggregators. People are out there using Bloglines, Newsgator and the many other feed readers. They don’t need the likes of blogrolling.com any longer. The web feeds of blogs are being sent right to their desktops and they need not go through the clicking of that daily read blogroll on the sidebar. Even I ignore the blogrolls on my sites now as I use my own aggregator. Technorati does read the blogroll list when it is pinged, as I often see sites that are linked to mine on their list. The blogrolling rings like The American Flag League continue to use this tool as a way of showcasing blogs and that also helps the Technorati link count.

I don’t see many business sites using the likes of blogrolling.com which is too bad. It’s a nice way of increasing traffic and increase your site’s popularity. It can also create that sense of community businesses strive for in their blog use. Perhaps we can bring back the blogroll use and have rings of business bloggers in certain niches, like blogrolling rings for plumbers, executives and retailers of all kinds. It may be too late to try to bring back to life blogrolling.com, but I fear it is an application who’s time has come.

It is too bad that blogrolling.com is going the way of the dinosaurs, because it was nice to be vain and see your blog appear on respected blogs and on those A-list bloggers’ blog rolls. Perhaps Tucows, Inc. is working on the next application of blogrolling. I hope that application will continue to feed my vanity.