Confession: I don’t actually read Slashdot any more. There — I said it. I’m sorry. I want to say that I am faithful to that venerable institution that is Slashdot, but I simply don’t have the time.
I do like to follow “what’s going on” on the web/tech bleeding edge, though. Have I switched to Digg, Reddit, HackerNews, the New York Times Technology section? No, no, maybe, and no.
I’ve found the best way to see what’s going on, what’s new, what’s interesting, is to just put the feed to http://del.icio.us/popular into my Google Reader.
All that is a preamble to the title of the post. If you follow the sort of things that appear in del.icio.us/popular (or Digg… or Reddit… or Some Other Webby News Place), you tend to find a lot of lists. That’s okay; lists can be nice. They can be a genuinely handy reference, a good way to separate the wheat from the chaff in a given search, motivating, and informative.
If you also follow the sort of blogs you might call metablogs — blogs about blogging, and usually about increasing traffic ergo Making More Money — you will have seen that “list posts” have acquired a vaunted status as a sort of Uber Link Bait. People like “list posts,” they link to them, they bookmark them, they may even rave about them and revisit them many times. For good reason — as I said, a good list of links, instructions, or ideas can be genuinely useful.
That being said — increasingly you find blogs that seem to be made up almost exclusively by lists. Smashing Magazine comes to mind; Mashable is becoming increasingly so (though they do still have Actual Content).
This morning I came across this on del.icio.us/popular: Firefox God: 300+ tools and resources for Firefox.
300? PLUS??
That seems a little excessive. When a list of tips, tools or resources grows to 300… is it still really useful? Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know… I do know that when I do a Google search, I rarely look past the first page of results — there’s just too many, and I expect the information I need to be in the top ten or twenty results. When I look at a list, I am looking for something I can digest quickly; show me five, ten, maybe twenty items.
Maybe I’m old fashioned; maybe I’m unrealistic. Maybe lists of 300 items have their place as a resource, if they are well-organized and if they are not just random samplings, but well-considered selections. Maybe lists like that are why Mashable reportedly earns $166,000 per month, and this blog earns only a few dollars. I’m not trying to slam Mashable, list posts in general, A-list-type blogs, linkbaiting, or anything like that. I’m sure I’ve written a list or two in the past, and will probably write more — given the statistics, maybe I should be.
Sometimes, though, the mass of these information-stuffed articles just seems like noise.
