Your Top 10 List Is Worthless: The Top 10 Reasons

Often introduced with time-wasting, content-devoid, redundant lead-ins, your Top 10 Lists* fail to deliver. Allow us to show you why:

1. Readers cannot remember 10 things.
   Your audience can barely remember one concept, let alone ten. Focus on one precise, concise thought per post: it is more likely to attract dedicated readers and not click-through junkies.
   
   
2. Your list caters to Digg, not to your audience.
   A well-focused blog serves as a Top 10 List (and more) without arbitrary consolidation and bounded enumeration. Your list is simply self-serving and masterbatory.
   
   
3. Itemized conceptualization abstracts concrete, actionable utility.
   Stick to grocery lists.
   
   
4. Reverse-ordered lists are difficult to format in HTML.
   Aesthetics and order matter. Countdowns, however, give the illusion that your Top 10 list features relative ranking. Even Letterman knows in practice that's bullshit.
   
   
5. They are predictable.
   And explanations are trivial and obviously written hastily.
   
   
6. The Number "10" is completely arbitrary.
   Be honest: you decided to write a Top 10 list. Then, you wrote down the first 10 things that came to you. If you couldn't make it to 10, you merely cut it to whatever number's the flavor of the month.
   
   
7. One item (or more) merely pads the list.
   Casually included somewhere near the middle, this witless numeral brings the list to a tidy 10. It is loosely relevant and summarily forgotten.
   
   
8. There are already too many Top 10 Lists.
   Because there are too many blogs, there are too many Top 10 Lists. Most readers have grown tired of the format. If they are still reading them, they're delusional or asleep. Most readers tune out by number eight.
   
   
9. They fade.
   You simply don't have the stamina to hold anyone's interest. No wonder you're alone.
   
   
10. You cannot remember 10 things.
    Your audience can barely remember one concept, let alone ten. And neither can you.
    
    Déjà vu?
    

Top 10 lists are predictable, arbitrary, and difficult to remember; thus, their authors conclude with clever quips to tie it all together. Inasmuch, the final note could replace the entire list as it is usually thoughtful and more delicately written than the list itself.

Top 10 Lists are worthless. Stop Blogging.

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*including the web's favorite variations: The Top 8, The Top 5, and the Top 20.

Pro-Abortion

For mediocre blog posts, we are neither pro-choice nor pro-life: we are pro-abortion.

Readers care not about your fatuous posts nor the great effort required to make them understandable. Readers demand only satisfaction. Your toils are irrelevant.

Abort your post if it is anything short of exceptional. Inasmuch, if none of your posts are exceptional (which goes for nearly all of you), stop blogging.


Activity of the day: Calculate your Post Abortion Rate (PAR)

Save your abortions as drafts and count your published posts. Add these two to get attempts.

Calculate PAR:

posts / attempts

If your scope is juvenile (i.e. Cute Overload), your PAR should be close to 0.9. (God help you if you 'write' for this blog.)

If you tackle Social Science, Causality Inference, and Statistical Modeling, you should have no problem calculating your PAR and it should be close to 0.5.

If you find yourself Philosophizing, take a moment to re-evaluate your writing habits (and, for some of you, your life decisions). Your PAR is nearly 1.0 but should be closer to 0.05. You write too much and say too little. You are not Camus. You are not Nietzsche. Your audience cares little what you think.

If hell is other people, their blogs are rampant Devil-spawn.

Abort your abominations. Stop Blogging.

The Doctorow Effect

Do not invoke Cory Doctorow in an effort to publicize your blog.

Mr. Doctorow will not be amused. You will not be "slashdotted".

In the unlikely event your ruminations* become (fleetingly) notable, expect harsh criticism and Internet memes created exclusively to nullify your personal credibility.

So, ask yourself, is it really worth attracting Cory Doctorow's following to your pithless blathering?

No. Stop Blogging.

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*defined as cud-chewing, not thought.

Check Your Facts

FACT:*

• 68.9% of bloggers don't spell check.
• 87.3% of bloggers don't fact check.
• 77.2% of bloggers don't proofread.

Yet, 100% of readers want and expect these things.

Fact check your blogs. Don't pull a valleywag.

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*These are not, in fact, facts; they are made up. You believed them, didn't you? And to you, trigger-happy types, I'll bet you blogged about these facts, lambasting your "peers" for being in the the non-(spell/fact)-checking population. Hypocrites.

New Years Posts

Each New Years, bloggers ceremoniously reflect on their year's worth of efforts, citing highlights and making resolutions for the new year.

Activity of the day: Read your old posts and make a New Year's resolution.

Actually, don't bother. We wouldn't subject even you to your fruitless musings. Here's your New Year's Resolution:

Stop Blogging.

Proper Post Proportions

Posting size and frequency should be proportionate to purpose and popularity.

Focused bloggers can afford to post frequently. That discipline yields readership. Examples: Feminist Law Professors, Engadget, ICANHASCHEEZBURGER.

Note that post lengths are inversely proportionate to post frequency: either posts are lengthy and occasional, or short and plentiful.

Also note that you need not read every word to get the point.


Activity of the day: Calculate your Blog Post Proportion (BPP).

Divide your Average Post Length by your Average Post Frequency. This gives you the number of words you expect your readers to read within a certain time period.

What's an appropriate BPP? Well, let's consider Scoble:

It would take the average American, reading at 250-300 words per minute, ten minutes to merely sift through today's 2,300 words of content across 8 different posts... save nothing for the 30 hyperlinks embedded in each post.

Is Robert Scoble worth 10 (or more) minutes of your day? Every day?

No.

Yet, your turd of a blog most likely contains as high, if not higher, BPP. Can you hold a reader's attention for 10 minutes a day, every day?

No. Neither can Scoble.

By comparison: this post, at 207 words, takes the average American less than a minute to read.

Why You Bore Me

You don't get to the point.

See that? I handed you the punchline. Whereas you, you meandering peasant, open with wandering prolegomena and half-baked musings without semblance of cogent thought.

Take this moment to apply the following exercise to the last thing you've written so that we may quantify how much you bore me.

Activity of the day: Calculate your Lead-in Logorrhea Index (LLI)

Identify the clause that contains the punchline and count the words in that clause. Call this x. Now, count every word (including parentheticals and numerical statistics) leading up to that clause. Call this y.

If x is less than 10, the LLI is:

y / (10 - x)

If x is 10 or greater, the LLI is:

(y + 10) * (x - 8)

Punchlines greater than ten words incur a hefty penalty.

If you cannot identify the punchline, your score is ∞.
A perfect score is zero-- which is precisely how much you should publish.

Stop Blogging.