MY MASSIVE BLOGROLL...

...is temporarily defunct.

You can thank Google, who in their great corporate wisdom decided to deep-six Google Reader, which I had been using to manage my blogroll after Bloglines went belly-up.

With the explosive growth in social media, RSS accumulators like Reader just aren’t sexy any more, never mind that I rarely used it for that purpose.  For me, it was just an easy way to display my vast heap of bloggity links.

I’m looking for a reasonably easy way to reconstruct my blogroll.  At the same time, I most likely will ditch the 80% of the blogs on it that are no longer active.  “For old times’ sake” is a crappy reason to keep someone’s site on the sidebar, especially considering the fact that blogging is an ever more moribund platform, one that is steadily losing ground to Facebook and Twitter.

And that’s too bad.  Twitter (“Blogging for People with ADHD”) is OK as far as it goes, but Facebook is a very different animal, involving as it does an audience that you select for yourself.  What impressed me about blogging was (and still is) its ability to create communities solely on the strength of peoples ideas... and their ability to express them in an engaging manner.

There are still a few workable links on my sidebar... the rest will have to wait until I find a suitable replacement aggregator/blogroll manager.  Hard-coding?  That’s for chumps.

Update: Fixed!  I’ve migrated my RSS feeds to AOL Reader (for now) - it’s pretty much a drop-in for Google Reader.  As for the blogrolls, I was able to pull my old list into some new widgets that get the job done just fine.  Next step will be to comb through the lists and ditch anything that hasn’t been updated in, say, a year.