Why do lists work so well?
An article from Seth Godin touched on it - lists are great because there's so many infinite possibilities. It easier to choose a book you would like to read based on a list of top recommendations for any particular subject. I'm a victim of this myself - I find it very difficult to buy a book now unless I know it's been rated highly on Amazon. I don't want to waste my money on some equivalent of a steaming pile of dog poo.
A year or 2 ago, somebody caught on and created listable.com. It was a nifty little web2 site where you could create a top list of anything you wanted and publish it on the site. Then the porn kings caught on to listable and abused it. Now the domain just goes to a holding page. But that was the problem with listable - it was just lists. Some of them were good, but mostly not.
So what makes a good list? Anyone can make one. Here's mine:
- A list will absorb the readers attention more readily (a kind of "user friendly" reading?).
- Ability to contribute to the list from qualified commentators.
- Ability to refine the list from qualified commentators.
- Ability to publish the list to a wide audience and attract qualified commentators.
- Be easy to find for the right audience.
- Quality filters to keep out the noise, commercial influence or unrelated content.
Got anything else?
