marketing

In my years as an interwebs information consumer, I’ve gleaned great insight into one of the mainstays of online content: The top (n) list. Here are some essential tips to creating amazing top n lists that will thrill and excite your readers: Pick a number, any number, ideally the one that takes the least amount of work to fulfill. Top 5 foos, Top 100 bars, doesn’t matter. If you want to cover, say, online apps for a making lists and you have 100 of them to cull through, forget that grunt work and just list them all....

This morning I was going through a working group’s internal documents about best practices, procedures, etc. for coordinating communications between all of the group’s members, who are scattered worldwide. At one point, on the topic of email netiquette, there was a recommendation to follow the rules of a rather emphatic post, “How to correctly quote e-mails and news posts,” which is “[p]artly written by Tom Sommer.” I think it was the “correctly” part that got me going here on this blog post....

People love “Top” lists – Top 100 Movies of All Time, Top 100 Novels, 100 Most Powerful People, 100 Richest People, Billboard’s Top 100 Songs, Top Grossing Blockbusters … In a mainstream culture, being in the “top” is something of an honor. On the web, there have been recent “Top” lists, too. Two in particular have received a lot of attention: the Technorati 100 and, more recently, the Feedster 500....