Friday, February 23, 2007

You are the weakest link... goodbye

While it is usually difficult to decide whether to place someone's blog on your sidebar or in your blogroll, it is probably more difficult to remove someone. This afternoon I had to face that kind of decision-making.

Sometimes it is a personal decision based on something another blogger has done or said that has really upset you, but I think in most cases when you remove someone, it isn't really personal at all, and none of my removals were personal. Most of my pruning was aimed at blogs that haven't updated in a long time or ones which I no longer read, and so I can't really recommend anymore. It wasn't personal, it was just the feeling that on some of these blogs I didn't think that I could contribute to the conversation, and if I couldn't really participate, I felt weird reading about them, like I was a peeping tom or something, so I decided to cut my losses so to speak.

Now that I've started to think about my reasons, I am wondering what criteria do you use to make a decision about removing someone from your blogroll.

Of course, I may regret the title of this post, but since I am all about the pop culture, I thought it was fitting, if old.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, good question. So far the vast majority of blogs I've cut have been because the blogger simply stopped writing or the blogs literally disappeared.

Only one did I drop because she dropped me first. I don't know if I or one my compatriots pissed her off with something we said (most likely), but since nothing was said to me, poof, she's gone.

Anonymous said...

I tend to leave people on my Blogroll but remove them from my Bloglines or Google Reader if no longer want to read them or whatever. However, if someone really pisses me off, I will take them out of my links faster than you know what.

For you it must be a bigger decision since you have a very specific kitsch to your blogging!

Brandon said...

Thanks for the link and thanks for this post. It reminded me that there were some people I wanted to dump from my blogroll. All of them stopped blogging at some point. It's rare that I drop anybody for any other reason.

Mel said...

I'm glad to see I'm still there! You had me worried I fit into one of those descripts for a second there.
I will remove someone if they stop blogging or if they no longer appeal to me. IOW, if somebody has been blogging about their life at random for the whole time I've been reading, and then suddenly decide to narrow their focus down to, say, toenail fungus, I'm probably done. Yick.
(I took cold medicine a little while ago.)

MC said...

Schad: Ah, a reciprocal drop... that is common too.

Hilly: When I was thinking about your comment, the phrase Kitschoire Faire popped in my head for some reason.

Brandon: Good to know. :)

Mel: How could I drop someone who could pull off a title like "OMG Gess Whar I M Bloggin Frum" That is a rare quality.

Karl said...

For the most part, I think my blogroll consists of only people I read/recommend. I haven't looked at it in a while. The links I keep there are often reflected in my feedreader, but not always. I admit to pruning my feeds every so often and there are very likely links in my blogroll that I no longer follow.

Anonymous said...

Right now my blogroll is small enough that this isn't really a problem for me, but I'm now dreading the day when I need to start chopping heads.

I'm going to have fun with it when I do though. I'll go all Colbert on their asses, and create a seperate blogroll of people "on notice." If they don't update or make reparations within a certain number of days, they're dead to me. :)

poppedculture said...

My blogroll is long and unwieldy, but it got that way naturally. First there are my friends’ links - people I actually know in the real world. They only get dropped if they stop blogging.

Then there are the big names/talents in their categories - celebs, TV, movies, pop culture, etc. These are the bloggers I think are tops in their field and if they link to me, fantastic, if they don't, oh well.
That is followed by the links that are a mix of blogs I read, ones that are harder to categorize and ones that link to me. I've made a policy of linking to anyone that links to me as some bloggers really helped me with traffic when I was starting out. I will drop some of them if they stop blogging or linking from me. But mostly I don’t, as I'm lazy.

The last bunch is a link exchange. I know some of the sites involved, but most are just fellow participants.

And that is my overly long, likely uninteresting account of my linking tendencies. But you did ask.

MC said...

Karl: That reminds me, I should really make an effort to sync up my bloglines and blogroll.

Jim: The Colbert thing could definitely work. I have a friend who called out a few of his fellow bloggers for not posting for months most of them started back up.

Jeremy: But your blogroll is so well organized and your typographical choices make it an excellent use of your available sidebar real estate.