Blogging is the new breathing. Everyone’s doing it. Unless that’s tweeting, or tumblring, or flickring, or facebooking, or whatever the fad is this week. But let’s concentrate on blogging for a moment. Blogging has made it so easy for anyone to set up a site, install a template, and post a few articles, that there’s now so much information out there you can’t see the wood for the trees. The diamonds are getting lost in a sea of average (and often below-average) crap.
And so, the “list” site was born. The “we filter the rubbish so you don’t have to” site. The site that seems to do nothing other than collate other people’s posts and then try to claim they’re doing us a favour by doing so. For example, if you see a headline like 100 Amazing How-To Sites to Teach Yourself Anything, you might think that could be a really useful list. Hey, I could learn anything I want, and I don’t have to search the web to find out how to do it. These people have done it for me. Ok, so now take a look at the site itself.
There. Learned anything? If you’re like me, the only thing you’ll have learned is that you don’t have time to look at each and every one of the sites listed to find out if they’ve got anything there that you might want to learn. The point is, google is so much better at pointing us in the right direction than “list” sites like this. If I want to learn how to tie a windsor knot, or how to get red wine stains off the pet dog, I ask google, and sooner or later I’ll find a tutorial or video showing me what I want to know. Ok, maybe not so much in the second example, but you know what I mean.
Let’s look at another “list” entry – this time it’s 100 Tips to Be a Smarter, Better Twitterer. I’m going to rant and rave about twitter in another post, but for now I’ll just say that this is another list that’s way too long and gives you far too much information all in one go. On top of that, nothing mentioned in the list is unique content, it’s all links to tips written by other people. So, what’s the point?
Then we get to 9 tips for Brand Building With Web Design. Why only nine? Can’t he find another one and make it a top ten?
Web Design Ideas Huge List Of 395+ Web Design Resources goes completely the other way. Far too many resources, even the number 365 in the heading is enough to keep me from clicking on it. And when we do click, what do we find? Links to 10 other “list” sites, with no mention of whether they are any good or not, or whether they offer anything useful to the dear reader. This strikes me as being an entry “just for the sake of posting something”.
Where did I find these links? I looked at the rss feed for http://doggdot.us, and they were all there this morning. This is just what’s come up today, folks. I spent all of 30 seconds gathering these links, so don’t be thinking that list sites are a niche thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more list sites out there than content sites.
And why are there so many list sites out there? Because you can make money from blogging, that’s why. Doesn’t matter if you have original content or not, you can still make money out of it. These sites are the second hand car dealers of the net. Actually, that’s a bit unfair. With a second-hand car dealer at least you know what you’re going to get. When you first come across one of these sites you might be forgiven for thinking you’re getting some useful information.
