In the beginning, blogrolls served a few purposes: they gave blog writers the opportunity to highlight other blogs, they offered readers a way to discover new blogs, and they served as a "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" tool to boost your blogosphere profile and/or Technorati rating. Today, the blogroll has become a bit of an anachronism. Sure, there are people who continue to add new blogs from time to time but I would argue many blogrolls are either collecting dust or have become outdated. For people still keen on growing their blogrolls, the problem is the larger they become, the harder they are to navigate. Truth be told, blogrolls have become an increasingly less relevant discovery tool for me. In many cases, I find new blogs through links provided on other peoples' posts. So perhaps it's time for the traditional blogroll to go the way of the dinosaur. Maybe it's time for new discovery tools to replace the blogroll. One example is TheGoodBlogs (disclaimer: I'm an advisor), which has developed a customizable widget that constantly highlights new blogs. Since I installed it two months ago, it has proved to be a valuable and useful tool. Another blogroll alternative is Dave Winer's Share Your OPML, which allows people to share their blogrolls. And then there's RSS readers, which are replacing blogrolls as the way for people to track the blogs they like. So the ultimate question is when will blogrolls disappear? In my case, I'm not ready to get rid of it completely but I am beginning to believe my blogroll needs to be smaller and used to highlight the blogs I really like and new ones that I find interesting.