In response to traffic from your website I know my friends and I found you through the guardian at first and started directly coming to your blog. I do know quite a few that follow your blog and really like to read what you have to say on here.

As for Ask.com - they have a great platform the unfortunate part is that since businesses really focus on Google for rankings - they receive more queries. People have taken to really understanding how to game the system with Google and have not spent nearly the time with others like Ask. Too bad. I would love to see them come back. they are constantly upgrading their service.

Amber, thank you, as I say, all readers gratefully accepted. However, the problem is that the result overall is very very small.

Fwiw, I've been stopping by less often ever since Ed Felten's redesign. He dropped you from his blogroll. He dropped everyone from his blogroll. He doesn't have a blogroll anymore.

But my browsing habits are something of a special case.

Not only am I browsing almost exclusively through Tor these days, but further, I'm not keeping any bookmarks on my local machine. And, of course, I don't keep any browser history, so I can't simply return to previously visited sites—my browser doesn't know what sites I've previously visited.

All that makes blogrolls more important for navigation.