Apparently, the blogroll controversy has flared up again. I'm too lazy to dig out all my old posts to check what I thought about the whole thing then, but I figured I could use this for some blog fodder since I don't have anything else in particular I want to expound about this Saturday.
I admire the fact that some people can stick up for their principles and actually go around delinking and deleting their blogrolls--but I don't think it's so much that there's a malevolent old boy's club at work but that of the existence of an A-list. (Well, maybe there's a malevolent old boy's club at work, but let's disregard that for the purposes of this post.) Maybe not the same people will complain, but somebody will complain even if the A-list is made of women or actually diverse.
My theory is that most people are lazy. Why bother expending effort to search out new blogs when there's already a neat little top ten list at one of those blog ranking sites? Why bother when that Famous Blogger has that list on the sidebar--he's Famous so those blogs must be good, right? I think laziness also explains why political blogs are so popular. People have different interests and normally, they might gravitate to all those obscure knitting or gardening or squaredancing blogs if they weren't all so obscure--but the political blogs are publicized and because people are too lazy to check if there are any other kinds of blogs, well, there you go.
I think it's all a matter of control, too. Just as meddling mothers want to control their kids (even when their kids are forty-year-olds) and the self-righteous claim certain relationships are morally wrong (even when the individuals involved love each other), people want to control whether their sites are linked on other people's sites. Everyone else can do whatever they wish with their blogroll or lack of one and I wouldn't care a whit so long as people don't come along and dictate what I do with my links. The main thing is--people should care more about their own content than those links. Readers visit your blog because of your posts--those links are incidental and at most, only have importance for your own organization and the visitors who are bored and don't want to waste time on Google.
(For those of you who don't already know, my own blogroll is on my links page. And no, I will not divulge my criteria for getting on--or getting off--that list even if it is completely random. Bookrolling is obviously a play on blogrolling, but unlike blog lists, my book list is far more updated and transparent. But this post isn't about books, so I think I'll stop here.)
