Selfish?
Halley: “More and more weblogs are taking down their blogrolls. What gives? It's a selfish UI to either hide them (inconveniently) on another page or simply get rid of a blogroll completely, especially as more and more new readers are getting turned on to weblogs.”
But asking to be on the blogroll of someone who gets thousands of hits per day, that's not selfish. Gimme a break.
Then she says that not having a blogroll is “Roach motel thinking -- a reader can check in but never check out. A blogroll-less blogger makes the arrogant assumption they have so much to offer, no one would EVER want to leave their weblog. Yeah, right sure.”
No, really. And let's not forget people with sidelinks who link to great weblogs with commentary. Would you rather a simple link to the front page with no indication as to their quality, or a link to a poignant or funny post from a favourite blogger? Sure, blogrolls are tacit agreement with the authors' viewpoints, or at least an indication of how good they are, sure, but in the end, they're just simple lists, sometimes categorized, but usually not. Lists are almost always inexaustive. My blogroll is inexaustive. If you have a blogroll, so is yours.
As if weblogs themselves aren't a selfish activity. They're supposed to be unedited voices of individuals—nevermind that it's not possible to have an unedited voice. Besides, being arrogant is the whole point of weblogs. (Denying arrogance is a a pretty arrogant attitude, if you ask me.) The absense of a blogroll may be the product of an arrogant assumption, but starting a weblog is a far more arrogant act than the decision of whether or not to have a silly list of links on the sidebar to weblogs you may or may not read yourself.