What’s the purpose of a blogroll? It used to be, in the glorious days of the start of ANO, there were two kinds of blogrolls: one kind had links to blogs the site’s author enjoyed, and the other kind had links to blogs that the site’s author had made link exchange deals with.

Then the community started growing and it became the fashion to add new bloggers to your blogroll, to get them some attention, etc. Reactionary bloggers cleared up their blogrolls, deciding that blogrolls were losing their meaning with the huge influx of links that no one really cared about.

Somewhere along the line, I made a post about my blogroll, essentially an attempt to justify why I had links to the sites I did. A couple other bloggers may or may not have followed suit. I don’t really know.

Anyway, when I came back to anime blogging a few days ago, I found myself facing a challenge: my blogroll.

Several links were broken, the result of blogs moving or dying and disappearing. Several links in my blogroll I had previously set to not show because they had been blogs I didn’t really read. I fixed the broken links where blogs had moved (ex: ikimashou.net, Cruel Angel Theses, etc.) and removed links where the referenced site existed no longer, but there remained the problem of the blogs I don’t read. That demographic nearly tripled in size during my hiatus as I stopped paying attention to individual sites and just took glancing glances at Anime Nano’s overall RSS feed five times daily. So yeah, coming back to blogging, I found my blogroll was full of duds.

I cleaned it up a bit, but kept on a bunch of links to sites I’m not really interested in. Some of them are sites run by people who I was once familiar with (before the whole disappearing thing).

Given that times and hearts change, I’m not really sure why those links are there. And so here’s my question, and not just because I want advice (I think I know what I’m going to do with my blogroll): what kind of blogroll do you keep? What links go and what kind stay?