Blogrolls, sometimes thought of as the overused bane of sidebars everywhere. The advent of which bulked up blog linkage everywhere, got set upon by staggering amounts of spam, and still today is an excellent way to find related content to the blog you’re currently reading. Tucows bought Blogrolling back in 2004 and provided an outsourced hosted method for keeping and managing blogrolls, which became popular primarily because of the advent and explosion of blogging platforms like WordPress.

Now that service is shutting down, according to Duncan Riley at The Inquisitr,

Founded in approx January 2002, Blogrolling offered hosted third party blogrolls, these days a fairly irregularly used feature on blogs which allowed blog owners to list and link to blogs of friends and blogs of similar topics in their sidebar. The service came at a time where blogrolls were not regularly offered as a standard feature in blog management systems.

Acquired by Tucows in February 2004, Blogrolling grew for some years, and offered services such as hot blogs lists based on the number of blogroll links offered among members. At acquisition the service was used on 1.5 million blogrolls.

Tucows, from Toronto, Canada, has been a long time place that many people went for software downloads since 1999 and their acquisition of Blogrolling certainly set their game in the blogging sphere. No news has appeared on Tucows blog about the closure yet, but as many services such as WordPress and other blogging software now supply their own blogroll plug-ins and the withdrawal from blogrolls in general may have reduced the number of consumers for the Tucows service.

The announcement as to the precise date that Blogrolling will shut down and close its doors is said to be coming this week and will permit users enough time to export their data. The closure of Blogrolling also joins an announcement about the shut down of Bloglines, the RSS reader service.