Monday, December 26, 2011

The one trend in blogging I really hate

It's the fascination with titles that have numbers in them. It started when that idiot posted something that wound up widely retweeted (and repeatedly blogged upon) that said you should talk about six things that..., or the top five ..., or your favorite three ... I cannot seem to get away from social media articles on Flipboard or Zite that start that way, so I hardly use those tools anymore. Fortunately, there are a lot of other real content providers out there who havent't gotten the message yet, so at least my science and some of my tech feeds have better leads. My one admonition to these headline writers is to please remember that your audience is intelligent, even if the SEO engines are stupid zombies.

4 comments:

  1. Bloggers have gained the experience from the print world that these lists are extremely popular with readers. It gives them something to talk about and argue about that is basically safe and meaningless. It's more than the title. It's the entire "list article" approach.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Like the one you did just a few days earlier?

    WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2011
    Top 10 HealthIT Standards Efforts of 2011

    ReplyDelete
  3. And in 3 years, and over 700 posts, I've used that pattern a grand total of 6 times (counting this post).

    ReplyDelete