I'm not sure what blogging niches of the web this author is referring to, but the economic/political blogs that I frequent share links all the time, and they all have blogrolls, too (Ex. [1][2][3]). I even picked up links from a bunch of them on my amateur econ/pol blog a few months ago when I pointed out a mistake in a graph a bunch of them were sharing. So linking is not completely dead from where I sit. It's not even dying. YMMV.

[1] http://marginalrevolution.com/ [2] http://econlog.econlib.org/ [3] http://www.volokh.com/