Are blogrolls passé?

Tech-media-tainment doesn’t have a blogroll. It has a list of favorite websites in the right column, but none of those are blogs.
The list includes web resources that I frequently use as well as fun and informative sites. Any web surfer who stumbles onto Tech-media-tainment can get a glimpse of my interests from that favorites list.
But it’s not a blogroll.
Blogrolls got their start during the early days of blogging when online writers and artists wanted to generate traffic with fellow bloggers. The philosophy was: You post a link to my blog and I’ll post a link to yours. The name blogroll comes from the term “logrolling,” a political term for trading favors.
But blogging has changed. Some popular blogs have joined media organizations and mainstream media have adopted the blogging format for posting items online. Meanwhile the individual voices of amateur blogs have been drowned out.
Most of those corporate blogs do not have blogrolls. The people behind them probably figure: Why send traffic elsewhere when we can entertain and enlighten those web surfers longer here?
Blogrolls remain relevant to certain online users, such as political writers and activists who are building communities of similar thinkers.
But for the general blogging community, blogrolls seem out of date.
With Tech-media-tainment now in its second year, it’s time to update the TMT list of favorite sites.
The old list had 15 websites. Three are self-serving – Investors.com (owned by my employer, Investor’s Business Daily), my video website One Stop Video, and my Twitter feed. I’ll keep those and add IBD’s new tech blog, Click.
I’ll keep most of the others too, but I’ll drop Lolcats – I Can Has Cheezburger? and Yahoo’s most popular news stories and photos. I still like Lolcats, but just don’t visit it much anymore. I also don’t visit Yahoo’s most popular any more.
In their place I’m adding Geek Tyrant and At the Movies, both of which I’ve written about on TMT.