RIP Blogroll

I deleted the link to my blogroll -- Other Chess Blogs -- that I've been maintaining since November 2006: Rethinking Blogrolls. The main reason for keeping it was to track the links on my list of Top Blogs, but that isn't necessary anymore.

Has the blog craze peaked? For several months the total number of posts has been declining on the ~120 active chess blogs that I tracked each month (out of ~175 active in the past six months). A few months ago I searched for new blogs: Seen on the Chess Blogosphere. While some of these were very good, none of them made the list of Top Blogs in the short time that I tracked them.

The current craze in the online world is the social networking phenomenon, which I documented a few months ago: Chess Networking. Facebook, MySpace, etc. don't require as much knowledge or dedication as blogs do, and the community is much larger.

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While I was making the blogroll change to the sidebar, I deleted the RSS feed for Chess - MySpace News. The news.myspace.com domain now redirects to www.myspace.com. The service was announced in April 2007, and appears to have died a quiet death near the end of July 2008. The last entry on the feed was Beware the Robots at Delta Airlines on scholasticchess.blogspot.com.