Do people still pay attention to blogrolls?

Based on the answers Orin Kerr received when he asked readers at the The Volokh Conspiracy, the answer is yes.

As Orin says it used to be that blogrolls (the list of linked blogs down the side of a blog page) were really important. Blog readers followed such links to other blogs of interest. Like Orin, I didn’t think anyone paid much attention to blogrolls anymore.

Though some folks responded that blogrolls are no longer as important because of the use of newsreaders, at least half of the folks responded blogrolls were sill important. A sampling:

• When I stumble upon new blogs, one of the first things I usually check is the blog roll. …[T]here are a lot of good sites I never would have found but for blog rolls. …I think it also helps preserve the community mentality that exists throughout much of the blogging scene.
• I use them often when looking at blogs dealing with subjects I hadn’t previously, read widely in.
• I think that blogrolls now are primarily useful in strengthening new blog communities. Mathematics weblogs, for instance, have exploded in the last year, and blogrolls help us to keep up on the community. As it ages and settles down, I expect the community to establish some sort of hierarchy and it will look a lot like blawgs do now. The blogroll will become less and less important as that happens.
• I almost exclusively use blogrolls to find new sites in an area of the blogosphere I’m not familiar with already. Topical organization is a must, though; too many sites just have a long roll (or worse, a constantly rotating one). The latter is especially bad if you do occasionally rely on clicking through from a blogroll to visit a site.
• My impression is that blogrolls are more useful for smaller sites with fewer entries in the blogroll. It’s good for finding friends of a friends blog. It’s not all that useful for big sites like this that have five zillion entries in the blogroll.

For us blog vets, it may be easy to dismiss blogrolls because we’re skilled in the use of Technorati and Google Blog Search to find blogs and monitor keywords. We’ll then have content served to our newsreader. However, it’s clear for people joining the blogosphere and for those joining a new community of blogs, the blogroll remains important.

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