Working on the Great Blog Roll Call this year has lead me to change a definition on the list in a big way. Previously I had always determined that a blog was considered abandoned after it had been left without an update for two full years (730 days). I think that's too long to keep a blog in my active list for reading or for the active list of blogs that update regularly (or even semi-regularly). So I'm moving any blog that hasn't updated in the last 365 days into the abandoned blog list. I'm not sure how much of a negative impact this will have on the overall list, but I would rather have the list be something that people can use effectively than have it filled with a hundred or so blogs that the authors don't even cares about enough to update on a regular basis.
Once a blog has been moved onto this list it will be out of contention for the Weekly Best Reads column, the Monthly Best Reads column, or the Yearly Best Reads Column. It will be checked once for the following year's Great Blog Roll Call and if it has not been updated it will not be checked again until the following year.
If you use an RSS aggregator then you don’t have to ever cull the list. And you appreciate blogs that are only updated when they have something worth saying over those that update just to appear active. Instead of removing the inactive ones, you remove the overactive ones.
ReplyDeleteThat would work better if I were doing just a private list and not working on a public list like the GBRC. That said a blog's output only bothers me if it stops being creative and just becomes a boring and tedious affair.
DeleteAnother way to go would be to have three categories. Active for once a week or more, intermittent for monthly or longer, and abandoned/inactive for no post in the last year or longer.
ReplyDeleteThat's an idea that brings on more talk. I'll have to marinate on it for a while.
DeleteI was just organizing my long list of tabletop blog book marks when I thought "someone must have done this before" and a quick google search later led me to your 2014 blog roll call.
ReplyDeleteWhat I have been doing is looking at the year of the latest post. Everything with 2015 stays on the list. Everything with 2014 goes into a dying folder, and anything with 2013 or earlier goes into dead. Private blogs (usually formerly public) also have their own folder
I haven't decided what to do with the dead blogs that are no longer even available (site deleted). For now they are sitting in the dead folder so I can remember the names if I ever get the motivation to find out if they moved, or that the content is archived by someone else.
My lists should be done by July 12 if you want to take a look at them.