Beyond Blogrolling

Recent hiccups with blogrolling.com—today’s hack, the slow response times, the dropped pings, occassional outages—have underscored the extent to which this third-party, proprietary service has woven its way deep into the fabric of the blogosphere. When blogrolling’s down most of us lose our primary means of navigating between blogs (short of an aggregator), as well as the ability to see who’s updated. In fact, I’d be curious to know if people defer entries while blogrolling’s down, lest they post and nobody see it. What started as an amenity to maintain links now has the potential to materially affect patterns of discourse throughout the blogosphere.

I haven’t done any research to know if blogrolling.com has competitors, but that’s potentially an issue too—leading to the same fractures in the blogosphere one finds in other sectors of the Web. What if blogrolling service A doesn’t allow you to list blogs registered with competitor service B?

All of which is to say, I wonder if anyone’s working on something like an open source, standards-based solution for blogrolling. If not, isn’t it about time?

I’ve had an account with blogrolling.com almost since I began blogging, and its generally been a good experience—so props, props, props. But the service has also clearly been a victim of its own success, hence this speculation about its successor.