Your Blogroll Sucks…and Mine Does Too

Building a blogroll is like attempting a long-distance relationship –  you will work really hard at it for the first month or so and then pretty much let neglect take its toll.

Some of the top finance bloggers have blogrolls or “links” pages that haven’t been added to, subtracted from or even glanced at in months.  In some cases, years!  It’s not that they don’t care, it’s more an issue of the real-time news taking precedence over updating a static section of the site.  If I have an hour-and-a-half to dedicate to TRB on a given day, I will need every one of those 90 minutes to keep the content up-to-date and fresh, there simply will not be time to update much else.

Even some of my blogger heroes have link sections or pages that are woefully outdated.  In one case, the guy has 100 links, many to sites that were popular back in 2006 but are no longer putting out meaningful content.  Even worse, many of these links lead to error messages.  Oh, and I’m not on there, which is obviously unacceptable.

There are also blogs that will frequently link to a site but never get around to adding that site to the “official” blogroll.  I am personally guilty of this.  Since first constructing my blogroll in 2008, there have probably been 30 sites that I’ve begun to read regularly (by following them in my Google Reader) and haven’t added.  In the time it took me to write this post about weak blogrolling, I probably could’ve simply updated my blogroll – and this is an affirmation of my point about the freshness of content being the priority.

My current list suits me, although it is missing many great financial bloggers to be sure.  Before moving over to the StockTwits Network, my list was three times as long but a lot of what was there was just obligatory and a waste of space.  I owe a Thank You to Phil Pearlman for convincing me that blogrolls in general are bullsh*t anyway and that having 75 links renders the ones that are actually meaningful to you irrelevant.

I guess my point is that I’m not diligent about the blogroll here on TRB and it is far from an accurate representation of my regular reads.  But I also don’t believe its become so vestigial that it deserves deleting yet either.

One day I’ll get around to it.  I bet I’m not the only blogger thinking this way.

What do you guys think?