Are We Rolling?
Just the mere thought of trying to assemble a list of my default apps gives me mild anxiety not worth the confronting. However, I’ve slowly but methodically been browsing that compiled list of participants looking for bloggers to follow. Which brings me to the subject of blogrolls.
More accurately, it brings me to Ghordano’s reply to Frank Meeuwsen’s request to see people’s blogrolls, “the best artifacts of the Early World Wide Web”.
Frank:
It gives the reader, the digital wanderer, more avenues and alleyways (thank you Rancid) to discover. Knowing that the author of the list is someone you can trust.
Ghordano:
Some people’s blogs I’ll read every post, some I’ll skim, some I keep to glance over post titles to see what is going in that person’s world.
Just the mere thought of trying to assemble a list of my recommended blogs gives me mild anxiety not worth the confronting. This is why—and I’ve mentioned this before, of course—my solution simply is to present you with an updating list of the actual blog posts by other people that I’ve actually read. This list appears at the bottom of my front page, above a separate list of places to find more blogs.
Frank might depict the blogroll as “handcrafted” and “not […] based on […] personal browsing history”, but that’s too much of a cognitive load for me. My updating list of reads is meant to split the difference. In the olden days, I did maintain a blogroll or two along the way, but part of what I like about this approach is that it suits my penchant for offloading cognitive effort to external devices, geographies, and processes whenever and wherever suitable.
It doesn’t really have a name, although the Instapaper folder it pulls from is called a “bloglog”, but in a sense it does operate through a kind of rolling release so maybe in its own, sly way it qualifies to be called a blogroll after all.