While I'm still trying to figure this out, you should read Shelley's original post, Steve Levy, Dave Sifry, and NZ Bear: You are Hurting Us and see whether you think the arguments against blogrolls are as wrong as I think they are.

Shelley's post does bring attention to important issues relating to the blogosphere. Ittoucheson how a simple matter canget complex very quickly. All of a sudden what was so simple, becomes pretty complex.
Blogrolls are completely ambiguous.Weuse them in a variety of ways, but the inherent ambiguity leads to misinterpretation, and in some cases it breedsdysfunctionality of the kind Shelley alludes to in this excerpt:

"..The Technorati Top 100 is too much like Google in that ‘noise’ becomes equated with ‘authority’. Rather than provide a method to expose new voices, your list becomes nothing more than a way for those on top to further cement their positions. More, it can be easily manipulated with just the release of a piece of software.."

When blogrolls started to appear on blog home pagesthere was no blogosphere as we know it today (most viewing was browser as opposed to aggregator based). Blogrolls where a great way of bootstrapping aburgeoning blogosphere (a kind of "look who's blogging now" symbol). The issue of Blogrolls being dynamic, static, or genuinely meaningfulwas unimportant, unfortunately. In a sense they were simple, static, and in today'sparlance: fashionably sloppy.
Today, we have a very extensive and lively blogosphere, it is now mainstream, and has basically become a data source in its own right; introducingchallengesexemplified by our inability to clearly state the meaning and purpose of a blogroll.
The question of "blogroll meaning" may result in alternative use of"attention.xml" which has the prime goal ofaddressing challenges associated withtracking and reading posts from a large blog subscription pool. Why not use this as the basis for generating less ambiguous blogrolls?
The blogosphere has been an important catalyst for understanding the current Web 2.0 inflection as demonstrated by the transition from the Web Browsers toFeed Aggregators & Readersfor reading and tracking blogs (blog home pages are secondary aspects of the interaction with any given blog these days).Unfortunately, there is a general perception that Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web are mutually exclusive, primarilydue tothe perceived lofty goals of the latter (what's wrong with being challenged?). From my vantage point, I continue to see Web 2.0 as a necessary infrastructure component for the Semantic Web that will ultimately providecontext forunderstanding why it'ssoimportant.
The Semantic Webwillcertainly aid in our ability to infer or deduce the meaning of a blog owner's published blogrollsince it provides avehicle for conveying such meaning in human and machine consumable forms. Until then, I remain stumped. I see where Shelley is coming from,but I don't know what to do with my blogroll right this moment :-) On the other hand I certainly know what I am planning to do with my real blogroll(not the snapshot you see today) in the not too distant future.