Dave Winer is putting much effort into rebooting blogrolls, which traditionally are a list of other blog sites shown on the right side of a main blog page. Back when blogging was more social than commercial blogrolls where a method of helping readers to find other blogs to read. You might recognize how on the right side of many blogs there are lists like Recent Posts and Archives such as on one of my WordPress sites, the placement of a blogroll is consistent with that layout.

When I compare the layout of my WordPress site to my Daynotes site the column to the right in WordPress appears to be a part of the page whereas the blogroll on the Daynotes page is obviously a different part. It’s a nit I know, but I prefer how it looks in WordPress when I compare the two.

Shortly after Dave began posting about his work, Manton added blogroll support to micro.blog, albeit with some differences. The blogroll support in micro.blog, which is being called Recommendations, is not connected to Feedland, which means the list of blog sites is stored and maintained separately and that is unfortunate. You can import an OPML file of the sites to micro.blog, but then have to maintain the items in micro.blog rather than in Feedland. One can delete and re-create a Recommendation, however.

Another difference is that micro.blog produces a static list, which is consistent with how blogrolls originally function, but doesn’t take advantage of Dave’s latest work that shows which of the sites have new posts to read. On the other hand, the links to the sites in the list is much more obvious to the reader than with the blogroll widget that Dave created. Compare the list on my Daynotes page to the new blogroll page I have created here. On the Daynotes page I can tell which blog has been recently updated, then a user has to click to expand to see the entries of the site and then know to click the date/time to the right of an entry to read the item. On the blogroll page all you see is the hyperlink to the site, which is more obvious to a reader, but one then has to go to each site to discover and read new entries. Tradeoffs.

The blogroll of my main blog is part of a page of the site that the reader needs to navigate to, which is due to my choice of template rather than a limitation of micro.blog. Manton’s blog shows the list of Recommended Blogs on its main page. I am personally torn on which is better because I like having just my writing appearing on the blog pages rather than the right side items you see on some sites. On the other hand, if the blogroll is not on the main page what is the probability that a reader will ever see it? I guess this begs the question, do readers actually click through to any of the sites on the blogroll?