I think that blogrolls are generally worthless. Yes, they indicate a blogger's interests or political orientation, but so does the content of the blog itself (and often better). To me, blogroll is just a $0.10 word for a long list of links that takes up space on a page and accomplishes little-to-nothing. It's a poor use of screen space and mostly a waste of bandwidth. When the blogroll is part of a javascript include, it's even worse; the page load speed is affected.

The approach I've taken on my blog is to list 5-10 "favorite blogs" and avoid the "blogroll" (all 100 of 'em!) approach. And I try not to list common blogs in this small list, but sites you might not have heard of, so it's actually useful.