I’ve got nothing against blogrolls. In fact, I often tell social media newbies who are looking to find and follow influential bloggers in a particular field to start with one blogger and then follow the links from his/her blogrolls.

But blogrolls can also lead you to plenty of dead ends, too. As Neville Hobson rightly points out in an audio comment of episode 98 of Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation Podcast, many blogrolls are hopelessly out of date (without naming names, Neville mentions that some of the bloggers he reads still link to a blog he stopped publishing on two years ago!).

This is the reason I don’t keep a blogroll here and didn’t do so on my former site: I wouldn’t do a very good job of keeping it up-to-date.

FriendsRoll and TopLinks

The solution for blogger and reader? It just might be in the form of two new WordPress plugins from 76Design, the interactive arm of the Canadian PR firm, Thornley Fallis.

If you take a look at my sidebar over on the right side of my blog (RSS readers: you’ll need to swing on by the blog proper to see this in action), you’ll see sections for TopLinks and FriendsRoll.

The TopLinks plugin displays the sites I’m linking to most often (only five display at once, but you can click “next” or “prev” to scroll forward or back), while FriendsRoll links to bloggers who self-identify themselves as readers of this site.

Now to be sure, these plugins aren’t perfect (yes, they are still in beta). For example, as I type tonight, my TopLinks are headlined by the generic Twitter.com and Flickr.com domains, when in fact, the actual links in my posts have been to specific user or photo streams. There’s also not a way to weight recent links more heavily than older links.

But on the positive side, the plugins do save me the trouble of having to maintain blogroll manually and you the worry of clicking on dead or outdated links.

If you have a WordPress blog, consider testing out the the two plugins on your site. You can download them here: FriendsRoll and TopLinks.

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