It’s simple really. A list post is useful if it contains new information, or information presented in a helpful bullet-point list. Now, I’m not judging anyone who chooses to write a list-post for their fancy. Whether it be a list of their favourite Photoshop brushes or whatever, but list-posts for the sake of list-posts are starting to grind my gears. No wait, they have ground my gears to dust already otherwise I wouldn’t be writing a post about it would I? Perhaps I needed a list-post to keep your attention this far, well…

From a blogger’s perspective, you may want to share with your cohort of readers stuff which you find interesting and to organise it into a single post with a snippet or two of comment. That’s not really the problem, what is, is all those mega-epic list-posts.

If I come across a list-post these days that has more than 10 such items, I’m generally more than likely to kill the tab off and just get on with life. Sure, there maybe something in that post which I’d never heard of, or which is really cool, but in amongst the rest of the same old stuff I’m less likely to find it or even care what you’re saying.

If that one thing I might find in your list post is so great, I will probably hear about it at some point anyway. I’ll just leave that up to life’s synchronistic duality. I have, or I have not. Either way, it isn’t going to significantly change my life and magically solve all my problems and fulfil all my dreams. It might make a slight blip in the way I operate, and maybe for the better, but what is certain is that a list post of 20 where the focus on one would do isn’t going to change much.

Sure Kuler is a great colour picking app, but I don’t want a list of 20 great AIR apps if what I’m looking for is a good colour picker. Ah, but what about a list-post of great colour pickers? Sure, it might make for a list-post, but between 5-10 is probably the most you need to go, and the less the better. Far better to focus on the few good ones you like rather than write a short sentence for each of 50.

So then, list-posts. They are and they aren’t, useful. I would request a genie to grant me three wishes then one wish would be to control all list-posts and the second would be to employ a genius to figure out what is crap and what can stay. The last of my third wishes would be to stop social media eating its own faeces with list-posts.

Knowledge-exchange can be likened to ripples emanating from a stone’s contact with water, where it hits, the water knows it is there, thereafter the water is less and less affected by it, but there is still some effect. The same applies to list-posts, the challenge is to write to your audience with what they might not know about, not to include everything related since the internet began. Those who see the latter as the challenge of list-posts miss the point entirely. If you throw the same stone into the same pool long enough, people will question the value.

Now I present to you the list post to kill all list posts. www.google.com . Just enter your term and search. Thanks for listening. This broadcast was brought to you by the List-Post Adjudication Party. Please vote for us at your next election. We’ll do nothing about it. That’s your job.