I'm duly honoured by each and every one of these blogroll links, so many thanks to you all. But I also notice that the list is 20% shorter than last year (which in turn was 20% shorter than the year before that). Ouch!
I compile this list every year, so I started by checking all 167 blogs on last year's list to see how many of them still linked here. More than one in four have fallen by the wayside and don't appear this year. Most of these are on hiatus (either deliberately, or through month-long neglect) which is a shame. A couple have simply vanished, which is a pity. Some have deleted their blogroll altogether, because blogrolls are so passé aren't they? And a few are still going strong but have removed me from their blogroll, which I guess is the way it goes, and I'm not bitter, honest. Still, at least a few new blogs have come along and added me instead, so I'm not losing out completely. Which is sort of nice. But the ever-shortening list is still rather disappointing overall.
As I've said before, blogging is changing. Fewer people blog these days because alternative platforms exist for digital broadcast. Blogrolls are invisible and irrelevant to anyone subscribed via an RSS feed. And readers are far more likely to click through to a blog via a one-off reference on Twitter/Facebook than via any long-standing blogroll. It's adapt or decline in the new new-media world.
Anyway, I hope this is a fairly complete list, but I bet it isn't. Let me know if I've missed you/anyone off the list, and I'll come back and add you/them later. As for the rest of my readers, maybe you'd like to click on a few of these 142 links to see what you're missing. I can't promise they're all thrilling verbal discourses, but I'm sure you'll discover plenty that are.
