You make two points about why people should have blog rolls.

Let me deal with the second one first - search engines. I have a motoring blog that I started in November of 2005 - every month since I started it I have doubled my search engine traffic and I don’t have a blog roll. I’m now at the point where I make a post on that blog today and in two to three days time Google is sending me search engine traffic for the key term in that post,

My partner and I have been around the net since 1996 when we launched our first site - we know how to achieve good search engine rankings and we can do it without blog rolls.

Now to your first point - blog rolls provide more information.

Not necessarily Grant - all they do is tie people down to what might be one small group’s version of truth - reality - call it whatever you want.

I write my blogs to provide information and I want my readers to question what I say and to challenge what I say and to think about it so I want them to go off and find more information for themselves. I don’t want them to wander over to my blog roll buddy and find the same information there. I want them to work for their information because they will get ore out of it if they do.

There is also a marketing issue involved here and that’s another reason why I don’t want people coming to my site after they have been round and round in a circle with my blog roll buddies.

You may not understand it but it works for me on a number of levels and the quote I gave back to that other guy’s blog explains it quite well.