Dave Weinberger, who started blogging even before me, writes about What blogging was.
Your blogroll was a list of links to the bloggers you read and engaged with. It was a way of sending people away from your site into the care of someone else who would offer up her own blogroll. Blogrolls were an early social network.
I miss the old days. He wrote this on his personal blog which he’s written on every day for well over a decade.
Via Twitter Weinberger suggested you read this comment too.