It used to be very common for sites to have a page that said "blogroll" at the top and it linked to a bunch of blogs and sites that the author liked. People used to find other sites like this, and these sorts of links powered early search engines.
I stopped having a blogroll after I switched away from Wordpress and didn't think too much about it.
But things changed. RSS worked1 1RIP Google Reader, 2013. It died so that Google+ could... also die a quiet death. and google search/Twitter were semi-reliable ways to find new things.
Now Twitter is dead, email newsletters are awful2 2though almost all of them were almost always awful. The medium is inferior to RSS in almost every way except a very important one: it's easier to monetize. , and Google search has lost its utility to the combination of earnest actors paying top dollar to appear at the top and SEO optimzer spam flooding the web.3 3And Goodhart's Law strikes again!
The web is full of walled gardens, hiding the beautiful things within behind large, bland, stone walls.
The fundamental problem of internet content discovery is hard again! It's now rather hard to find places with consistently good content. I love longform media. It requires thought and intention. And it requires time.
So I'm bringing back my blogroll (and more generally, a list of sites, links, resources, and books that I find interesting). It is at the top of every page. Check it out!
If you have a site, bring out your blogroll. Help the small web flourish.
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