Monday, September 27, 2010

Hey! You Took Me Off Your Blogroll!

Yes, yes I did. In fact, I removed the whole thing.

As most of you Wordhoarders know, this site is all about community. Unfortunately, some changes have made it more and more difficult to keep the community "feel" to the page. First was the rise of the RSS feed, which made it so people viewed posts without necessarily entering the site. Then for boring technical reasons we had to remove the comment section from the front page, which gave the Wordhoard more of a "hey, this is my page, and you can comment if you want, but you're not all that important" feel.

Now Blogrolling is having script problems, and in response they're simply shutting down the service. Feh.

I may simply expand the existing links to include all the stuff that used to be on my blogroll, but let's face it folks, the blog as a medium is fading. Keep visiting here, but more and more of the action is going on over at Facebook (which, for all I know, may itself fade in another few years).

We'll keep surfing along as different technologies come available: Blogger, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc. These changes will necessarily force the Wordhoard to evolve, but don't worry -- even though the blogroll came down, we're still about the medievalist community, no matter how you access us.

6 comments:

  1. I wouldn't count blogs out as a medium just yet -- but there are a whopping chunk of us who don't actually visit blogs unless we want to read the comments and/or comment ourselves. Vaulting and I both use aggregators, specifically google reader, to put all of the 60 or 70 blogs we read in one place, so we can read more of them. I've been thinking recently about the effect that this has on blogging communities, and I think maybe I'll post about it back at V&V in a little while...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Facebook is not a replacement for blogging; still less, Twitter. If people are retiring their blogs and moving "more and more of the action" over to Facebook or Twitter, then something is being lost.

    Yes, Facebook is sort of like mini-blogging, but it requires people to explicitly join (and either "friend" you or "like" you); it's not open to the hoi polloi. And Twitter is too severely space-constrained even to be called micro-blogging, in my opinion. It's okay for sharing web links and letting us know you just had a triple venti latte or a tasty burrito, but it's not good for very much else.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jason,

    I'm not retiring the blog itself for just the reasons you cite. However, most people now are not accessing the blog through the blog itself; they're coming to it through some other medium.

    In other words, all the stuff is still HERE, but very few people now come through their favorites links or type the URL. Most find us through an RSS feed, Twitter subscription, FB feed, or search engine (particularly Google and, with rising frequency, Twitter).

    The good news is that more people are accessing online medievalism in different ways. The bad news is that it's hard to aggregate them into a community when one comment thread is on FB, one on YouTube, one here, etc.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I'm doing a lot more conversing through Twitter these days myself.It's easy to keep TweetDeck open at work and then just hit a quick reply or retweet.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Great post! Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  6. 하던대로 에볼루션카지노 좋은곳에서 확인하세요

    ReplyDelete