When I first started reading blogs, blogrolls made intuitive sense to me. You had to keep track of the URLs of the blogs you read somehow, and making your reading list public was the friendly thing to do. This view was so clear to me that at one point I considered writing a techblog entry about how I didn't have a blogroll because I used different methods to keep track of my various blog reading.

(Possibly I would have talked about how the rise of feed readers would affect blogrolls. There's two views: on the one hand, the feed reader keeps track of URLs so that you don't have to, but on the other hand the feed reader may make it easy to publish the list on your blog via some sort of plugin and API.)

In retrospect, this was a rather innocent view of the whole thing. With more experience in blogging, I've increasingly come around to the obvious view that blogrolls today are less about having your reading list in a convenient place and more about a way of recommending (or advertising) blogs that you think are worthwhile.

(Mind you, I could be wrong; I have a skewed perspective on this because I have rather odd ways of keeping track of web sites and I am a heavy user of feed readers. I don't know if more normal people really do use their blogrolls for their own reading, but it's certainly possible.)