The Sports Card Blogroll at 300 Blogs!!!

When I started the Sports Card Blogroll almost two years ago, I did it only because I wanted to be able to keep up with the Hobby Blogging Community (or the Hobby Blogosphere) without having to go to another person's blog just to get to their blogroll. And while of course, there is a blogroll attached in the sidebar here, I really have been lax about adding more sites to it.

Back to the point.

When I started the big Blogroll, the only other "blog" doing a site of this type was Mario Alejandro's pet project, the Sports Card Blog Directory. He was able to get more than 100 Hobby blogs up on his site, which at the time was a huge milestone as the Hobby Blogging world had just started to grow. Soon, he found that he no longer keep up and eventually asked if he could link the Blogroll onto his site and use it as the new directory. Since then, I've noticed a lot of people have been using the Sports Card Blogroll (I did say it was free to use by anybody, not just me). The reconstruction I did in January, thanks to some of the suggestions of the people who used the site, has made the Blogroll better and easier to use and to find one's favorite blogs. Granted, it's a bit more work to maintain now, but I think you can see it's well worth the effort.

With the addition of the new Topps Blog on Monday, I am happy to report that for the first time EVER, the Sports Card Blogroll now has 300 active blogs linked within it.

THREE HUNDRED BLOGS!!!

That's 3-0-0 unique blogs talking about the one thing that unites us all...the Hobby of Sports Card Collecting.

While I was never worried about the number of baseball card blogs out there, and I knew that both football and hockey had their share of hobby voices, there was a point in time that I thought we'd be down to one basketball card blog. And that one seemed to have stopped updating as well. Now we have at least six basketball card blogs on the roll. The number of blogs in the Hobby Industry/Media blog section has increased in number since I started keeping tabs because card manufacturers have now seen the benefits of blogging about the Hobby to the online community and have given us a unique perspective into their philosophies and how they operate.

Granted, on the 21st, I'll be taking down a number of blogs off the roll due to six months of inactivity. But the fact that as of right now there are 300 blogs, and possibly more to find in 2010 (I have added 61 new blogs since the beginning of the year), I'm sure getting back to 300 and staying above that number won't be a problem.

I thank everyone who has linked the Sports Card Blogroll to their blogs, everyone who uses the Blogroll as a starting point (or at some point) in their daily trip through the Hobby Blogging Community (someone said it was like reading a newspaper, only with good news), and the people who continue to write and update their blogs in their own unique way, supplying us the readers with information and new ideas about the Hobby we all enjoy. Now that the Blogroll is at 300, the next goal would be getting 500 Hobby blogs up and running at any given time. Maybe get a cricket blog started now that Topps has the rights to create cards and other products for the Indian Premier League. How about soccer? I don't have any for either MLS or any international Football cards. I think there is one MMA Hobby blog. The possibilities are endless, and it only takes one person, one passionate collector, to get online, start a blog, and share their interests with the rest of the world.

The number of voices in this choir can only increase. We, as bloggers, are now more of an influence than ever. We are strong, and can only get stronger. And it is my hope that I can make sure that there is at least one place on the Internet where all of our stories, our ideas, our voices, and our collections, can come together.

Thank you very much. Keep on writing, keep on reading, and keep on enjoying the journey.

Sincerely,

JayBee Anama