sergiooooooo, yes, if its a roll in your sidebar. They're not extinct, but they are rare these days. Sprague, good to see you're still keeping the spirit alive - Duncan Riley
I used to use one, but it seemed as soon as I'd update it, people would go inactive, or I'd have to change it again. (Examples: GeekWhat and Kent Newsome, both who just about fell off the map) Now, I think the Google Reader shared items blog gives a good enough clue as to what I read and find important. - Louis Gray
I found that no one ever clicked on them so I removed it. It was just noise. - Kevin
I'm on the same boat as Kevin. No one ever clicked on them so, I just got rid of it. I have a section for "friends" that include a couple of blogs but that's it. - Candace Holly
I have one on my dembot blog and really believe in it. - Andrew Baron
My blogroll would probably span a few screens.. Anyway blogroll feels slightly 1990s.. Don't you think so? - Winston Teo
Which reminds me, I need to update my blogroll. - J. Phil
Still maintain one but update it about once a month as things change - Charlie Anzman
I still use them, but only for close contacts. I like them. - Jim Kukral
I once used them, when Zeldman was that name in the bottom of every blogroll (go figure why ;-) ) and then I stopped blogging - directeur via NoiseRiver
In my opinion, the best use for a blogroll is for a _short_ list of _related_ blogs that the reader can hit in order to get more information on the topic. The "600 blogs I read every day" doesn't seem to me to be the best use of a blogroll. - possible248
I'm trying to convince myself to compile a decent blogroll since 2002:) - Federico Giacanelli
Perhaps it's time to convert the blogroll to a micro-blogroll. Better yet, I would like to display the people I find interesting (at friendfeed) as a widget. - Czar Derek Peterman
I recently dropped the blogroll on my blog. No one ever bothered clicking the links. What people do click are the links in my blog posts (yes, it does still happen). The blogs to which I link regularly in my blog posts are a much better barometer of the ones I follow than my blogroll ever was. I really didn't keep the blogroll up to date. - Hutch Carpenter
Hmm, regardless of clicks, SEO's understand that a blogroll link is a vote in Google, or at least indexing priority. If you really like someone, you'll tell Google about their blog by blogrolling them. I never nofollow those. - Brian Carter
Czar: How do you describe your "intersting" people at friendfeed? - directeur via NoiseRiver
I have it on good authority that a new blogroll widget is in the works that will bring blogrolls back - well at least with this crowd. I probably shouldn't say who and I don't know when, but it sounds like it will be dynamic and awesome. So don't count them out just yet - David Knight
My blogroll was too long for my sidebar, so I used to have a separate links page. I should clean it up and bring it back. Need to add a TON of social media bloggers I've been introduced to via FriendFeed these past few weeks. :D - Nathaniel Payne
are blogrolls that hump of cheese n the back of your fridge? :) - (jeff)isageek via fftogo
How about this for a theory: The blogroll has been superceded by Twitter and FriendFeed as the easiest way to track and associate oneself with others that are active, interesting and influential in social media - Daniel Young
It's crazy to me how many have dumped them when it's the first step in being social online if you have a blog... good for blogger to blogger luv and also good for pointing your visitors to additional related resources of value, so good all around. - Scott Bannon via twhirl
Duncan, this is so true. I was literally thinking late last night about doing a post on this as I was tidying up my own (relatively new) blog a bit and looking at the standard blogroll links that came with my Wordpress template. I had a quick look at a few fairly well-known blogs and there wasn't a blogroll in sight.. - Matt Hooper
Regarding the value of blogrolls for Google SEO. Check out this thread, about 3/4 the way down, for a comment on that by Adam Lasnik (Google search evangelist): "be careful about making assumptions on how Google does or will weight 'constant' links ;-" (http://friendfeed.com/e/7c7d98...) - Hutch Carpenter
I read blogs mostly in Google Reader. When I'm on a blog, I'm focused on the content rather than the sidebar. I like the blog roll concept, but it would reach a broader audience if it moved to the main column of content. For example, instead of showing a Last.fm widget in my sidebar, I automated a weekly post that shows my top artists from the prior week as a regular blog post. http://bit.ly/4rQvZU - Joe Lazarus
"Nice work. Summize has some advanced search operators that output similar RSS. Here's an example that generates a feed with the same data as your Pipe:
http://summize.com/search.atom...
That's based on a search for "@toddsampson". The advantage of going straight to Summize is that you'll get the updates in a more timely fashion. Pipes caches results every hour or so." - Joe Lazarus
"I'm impressed by anyone who makes it on to Techmeme. It's a great accomplishment. I just figured that any anchor link on Techmeme would drive more traffic than this. As a point of comparison, I had a link that was very low on the top page of Reddit a couple weeks ago. It only received 77 votes from Reddit users (top links each day get close to 1,000 votes), yet the link drove almost 10k visits in 24 hours. I use Techmeme multiple times and day and find it far superior to Reddit and Digg for tech news, but your data suggests that Techmeme probably has a smaller audience than I suspected. Of course, one data point isn't enough to draw good conclusions. Thanks for sharing the stats!" - Joe Lazarus
"Getting on Techmeme is quite an accomplishment, but I'm actually surprised how low the traffic is in this case. I wonder how much traffic the top link on Techmeme generates." - Joe Lazarus
Is the "everyone" tab that useful? I was rarely able to use it for anything purposeful so far, tho it is sometimes interesting to watch to see how fast the system updates. - Philipp Lenssen
When I first started out, it was useful to see how people were using FF, as well as to see if there were any random conversations or feed postings I could crash in on. I think once you build up your network, there's not much value to it, but the initial value is still there. - Mark Trapp
I've looked at it once or twice, to get a random sampling of topics that might be interesting. Not very often though; the regular feed keeps me pretty busy. *grin* - Bruce Williams
I rarely use it. But it's one of those things that I'm glad to know it's there. - Chris Rossini
There is too many conversations in other languages for me to understand a lot of the stuff in the "everyone" tab. I'm not really complaining about it. People should be able to converse in whatever language they want, but I think that this is a big reason why the "everyone" tab isn't used that much by most people. - possible248
I use it in conjunction with filtering to restrict it to one service - say, Googlereader shares or blog posts. Turns up some interesting stuff, sometimes. - Tom Landini
"Everyone" tab is like "stumble upon", when you are idle, keep looking and might find something interesting :) - Rohit Srivastwa
I'd say 2 to 3 times a day. First I filter by service, browse a few pages, then switch services. Takes about 20 - 30 minutes. - Bwana McCall
I take a look every week or so, just to see if there's anyone new whom I find interesting. - Cyvros/fyc
with a http://twitturly.com/ -like buzz-detection for urls, friendfeed-comments and google-reader-shares it would be a lot more useful, - Max Hartmann
I rarely use the Everyone tab, I would say probably a couple of times a week to see if anthing I have missed is going on! - Joe Dawson
seldom. too many languages I do not understand and not filtering for it. - Nicole Simon
every now and again. It's like the urge to open a door on a moving train, and then slam it shut again... - Iain Baker
I use it, or actually I use the same thing on NoiseRiver to track questions and problems people are having with NoiseRiver, so that I can help better :) Sometimes, when it's the same news that cycle in my friends page, I go there to discover new ones :) - directeur via NoiseRiver
Occasionally. I would use it every day if it had the "best of" filter that surfaces the most interesting posts from all of FF. Same with search. - Joe Lazarus
+1 for I would use it every day if it had the "best of" filter but however i like it and i use it for search - Alessandro
Not so often. I usually search for a term that interests me and find people to add that way. - Colby Olson
It's interesting to watch occasionally, sometimes I actually find things to comment on or like. - xero
"Got it, thanks for the clarification. One feature I would like is an option to get a feed of the full posts as opposed to just title and snippet. It would look something like this...
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/p......
That's just a rough example that I threw together quickly. It's missing some of your posts because of the way I hacked it together, but I think you get the idea. I want to be able to subscribe to Tech NewsJunk in Google Reader and see as much of the article as the source includes in their feed so I don't have to click through each link, but can just scan the full posts in Reader.
Looks promising... nice work." - Joe Lazarus
"Ella, you're getting no results because you only listened to one artist on Last.fm last week. The Pipe is based on data from this page...
http://www.last.fm/user/uriela...
Since the idea is to show your top 5 artists, it's designed to only show results for a given week if you listen to at least 5 bands the prior week." - Joe Lazarus
"Can you explain a little more about how the stories are selected? Is this a list of articles that you personally find interesting? Is it based on some sort of wisdom of crowds? Are they articles that people submit to you? I like to have a sense of the editorial process for the news sites I use." - Joe Lazarus
"Wow, I knew the big labels controlled most of the market, but I didn't realize it was that dramatic. I guess it's at least good news that the indies are gaining in market share." - Joe Lazarus
This is a great Yahoo Pipe created by Joe Lazarus. It allows you to create an RSS feed for your loved tracks on last.fm. If you want your loved tracks on last.fm imported to this room, just leave a comment here with your last.fm user id and I'll add the feed. - Mike Doeff
One thing that I should add... The feed name is pretty generic (it's called Last Loved MP3's), so when the tracks show up here you won't be able to tell who it came from. Here is an example of how it will look: http://friendfeed.com/e/6920e6... - Mike Doeff
Mike, if you want to change the name of the feed, click the "clone" button in Y! Pipes. That will create a copy of my Pipe in your Yahoo! account. Once you have your own copy, you can rename the feed whatever you want (ex. "Mike's MP3's"). - Joe Lazarus
Thanks Joe. I'll give that a shot. If anyone in this room wants me to import your loved tracks from last.fm just leave a comment here. - Mike Doeff
"Hi Andrew, the feed shows your top 5 artists from the prior week. It's based on the information on this page from Last.fm...
http://www.last.fm/user/schweg...
As you can see, you only listened to 2 artists last week. When I made the feed, I decided that if a person listened to less than 5 artists for the week, that I would skip the update that week (ie. does a top 5 list make sense when you only listened to 2 artists). In order for the feed to update for you next week, make sure you listen to more than 5 artists this week." - Joe Lazarus
"Yeah, that helps. I also like their new "best of" feature that shows just the popular posts for the day or week, but they need a lot more filtering and sorting options." - Joe Lazarus
"Hey Todd, the player is working ok for me on LastButNot, but the tracks on your site aren't working. I don't think the issue is the player. Rather, it's the MP3 files that your page is pointing to. The way this thing works, it searches for a MP3 on Seeqpod and posts a link. The problem is that sometimes the site that hosts the MP3 file removes the track from their site at some later point. Some sites automatically remove MP3's after a few days so that they avoid possible legal issues. So, it's not uncommon that a few tracks on your page won't play. A good way to see if that's the problem (vs. some other issue) is to click on the MP3 link from your page and see if the track appears in your browser. If you get an error message, it means that the track was removed from the site my Pipe linked to earlier. I wish I had a way of updating the links in that case, but I don't now. Hope that helps. If you give it some time, your site will probably pick up some active links. In my experience,..." - Joe Lazarus
"Nice. Flickr has over 60 million geo-tagged photos today even though the process is manual and somewhat tedious. I suspect that number will shoot through the roof starting July 11th. Simple little location-aware features like this are going to have a huge impact on the web." - Joe Lazarus
"Thanks Matt. Unfortunately, my layout isn't available. I wanted something unique, so I made it from scratch and don't plan to share it. It took me a while to get it the way I want since I didn't know HTML or CSS. There are a bunch of free themes with sidebars...
http://customthemes.tumblr.com...
What I did is I started with one of those templates and messed around with the code till it looked the way I wanted. I found that it's easier to start with an existing theme and edit it rather than trying to learn to make one from scratch. A few small edits to the code can make it look entirely new. For example, if you add a background image, change some fonts, and customize the colors, you'll end up with an entirely new look.
Austin is great. I lived in there for a couple years, but I've been in San Francisco for the last 5 years." - Joe Lazarus
"Jon, feel free to copy the code by viewing the "page source" on my site. You may need to modify it to work with your layout. Also, my code is very messy... I'm not much of a web developer." - Joe Lazarus
"Cool. I setup the Last.fm client to automatically run when I turn my computer on. I access it through my system tray so it's always visible regardless of whether iTunes is the window I have open or not." - Joe Lazarus
"Aaron, good question. You can download the iTunes plugin here:
http://www.last.fm/download/
That software will connect to most major MP3 player software (itunes, winamp, etc) and will pass your listening habits to Last.fm." - Joe Lazarus
"I agree, although a few streaming sites do offer scrobbling from the web. Last.fm and the Hype Machine can both do it. Any site could... they just need to integrate with Last.fm." - Joe Lazarus
"Thanks Bijan. It's fun to mix it up every once in a while. I just wish I was a better designer & coder. I'm jealous of your professional design and clean HTML." - Joe Lazarus
