Four (or Five!) Reasons Why

….This Blog Should be Rockin’

1. Everyone loves lists - they’re the crack of the blogosphere. You write a blog using entitled “XX reasons why….”, and traffic spikes. People can’t help themselves when it comes to lists. Look at the longevity, for example, of David Letterman’s Top-10 List, which is usually not terribly funny.

2. They’re a quick read. Unless someone goes overboard, a list usually takes about a minute or so to read. It’s quick and simple yet so guiltily satisfying - kind of like those mini ice cream sandwiches that you eat when your kids aren’t looking.

3. Lists can be great fodder for water-cooler conversations, or those long, slow walks to Starbucks that slash corporate productivity while driving up Starbucks’ profits.

4. They can be written quickly, often with little or no research. Hey, why do you think this blog is devoted to lists?

5. Lists are “sexy” - so says Aiden Henry, among the other things he had to say about lists. We take issue with his contention lists are link bait because if that was true, Four Reasons Why would have hundreds, no thousands of RSS subscribers; we’d be the next Boing Boing; and we’d be cashing in huge AdSense checks…or something like that.

More: superblogging suggest lists are popular because people who read them are lazy, lists look organized so they’re easy to read, and it looks like the writer worked harder than they really had. They sound like reasonable assumptions to us. Actually, the first point is probably inaccurate because we would never call Four Reasons Why readers “lazy” - at least not in public.

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