I jest. Jason would­n’t use an out­dat­ed metaphor from the last cen­tu­ry like “blogroll.” He’s call­ing it a rolodex instead! (Just polled the 14 year old who has no idea what a rolodex is, naturally).

For those that don’t know, Jason Kot­tke pub­lish­es an old-school blog, almost as old as mine.¹ He’s does a great job high­light­ing all sorts of inter­est­ing links and videos and it’s been one of my essen­tial dai­ly reads for a long, long time (I first men­tioned him on my blog 18 years ago). I’m a month­ly sub­scriber, hap­py to give my lit­tle bit.

He’s been exper­i­ment­ing with blog­ging com­mu­ni­ties all this time and there’s a lot of good inno­va­tion con­tin­u­ing late­ly. From the post:

The Rolodex is part of this “strat­e­gy” of relationship-building and strength­en­ing of trust­ed sources of infor­ma­tion. You read­ers are curi­ous about what I read and pay atten­tion to, I enjoy link­ing to things I like (duh), and I believe it’s more impor­tant than ever for those sites who traf­fic in knowl­edge & curios­i­ty and care about humans to acknowl­edge and stand with each oth­er. As I wrote last year, we are not com­peti­tors; we are collaborators

It feels like sites like his are rein­vent­ing the ear­ly 2000s. Social and search are fail­ing us so we’re rein­vent­ing blog rolls (a blog author’s list of favorite sites). It was fun watch­ing this build organ­i­cal­ly back in the day but I won­der if we can recap­ture the magic.

The com­ments thread on my per­son­al blog used to be a live­ly back-and-forth, with a sol­id com­mu­ni­ty of reg­u­lars and a few dozen-or-so active blogs that all linked to one anoth­er. Nowa­days I’m lucky if I get a few com­ments all year. Com­ments are also drop­ping away in the niche-but-longstanding print/online pub­li­ca­tion I work for, espe­cial­ly wor­ri­some as they’ve been basi­cal­ly pow­er­ing our letters-to-the-editor col­umn for the last dozen years. I won­der if peo­ple are just more ret­i­cent to share out­side of estab­lished bulletin-board-esque web­sites (eg Face­book, Red­dit, Sub­stack). Glad to see it’s work­ing on Kottke!

1. I date my blog­ging begin­ning to the end of 1997, when I redesigned the home­page of my Non​vi​o​lence​.org web host­ing site to include week­ly updates to the best mate­r­i­al I was pub­lish­ing or read­ing elsewhere.