Top 10 List of Top 10 Lists …

Sorry to disappoint you so suddenly, but the title of this blog post is a misnomer. In fact I am not about to make a top ten list of all the top ten lists out there in the blogosphere, but rather am going to post a rant about how useless and awful they are and how their presence is simply clogging the interwebs up with replicated junk.

Nothing annoys me more than seeing yet another top 10 list, or top X list of anything for that matter. As mentioned already they are easy fodder, with little excuse for any creative input, whilst editorial input is equally questionable. Many that I see repeatedly tweeted, are the same thing regurgiated over and over yet in any combination of orders. Worst still are those ‘Top 100′ lists that go on and on and on, and nothing more than glorified lists of “CSS”, “Web Design” or some other tag word from Digg, Delicious or any other social bookmarking sites.

From an SEO perspective I know they are great, people with little time can’t be bothered to search and so anything that makes their lazy life even more easy is a win-win for them. They tweet said link and then this gets retweeted repeatedly. The great @JackMarshall himself has been ranting on about the power of the retweet recently via twitter, which ironically itself was probably retweeted a gazillion more times. Moreover, other bloggers will write their own 1 paragraph excuses for a blog post that simply refer yout o some other blog with their list of 10 greats, usefuls or handys.

I know that the power of content online going forward is in the editorial side of things. That what editors leave out rather than put in is what will define great content from mere content. Content that adds real value rather than pumped out for the sake of a few tweets and retweets, or copy-and-pasted from another site for the sake of padding out your sites weak content with little time to write anything original. These re-doctored lists that I loath so much are really nothing more than an excuse for plagiarism.

As a developer, and someone who prefers to add original content to the web, I implore bloggers to create original content rather than to throw up these re-hashed lists for the entire web to bandy about and do nothing more than link to, which ultimately cloggs up search engine results with junk :(

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