List of Lists - Hacking Complexity - Lists Reward us by Proving were Smart and Making us Smarter.
- Lists prove were smart – “Knew that!”
- Lists make us smarter – “Didn’t know that – Do now!”
- Lists are addictive. List rewards are variable & random!
- Lists add strucuture to life
- Lists are a hack.
- Lists are a metaphor for simplicity
- Life begins with a baby name list
- Life ends with a bucket ist
- Life is a list of lists
- Lists are an abstraction
- Lists are a wrapper
- Lists are a lens
When the tough get going they make lists – lots of lists. Then they manage their chaos from a list of lists. Lists play a serious role in simplifying life.
What keeps us coming back for more lists. Simple. Lists reward us by proving were smart. Who doesn’t wan to know that. Lists fill in gaps, so make us smarter. Are all lists born equal? No. So the reward is random. There is nothing like a random and variable reward schedule to make us want more.
Life isn’t simple and simplicity isn’t simple either. Lists give you strategies to remove, organize, hide and displace complexity. These are outlined in this list from GetFinch.com
- Remove: Get rid of anything that isn’t essential to the application. This could mean content, too; like the language you use in the navigation labels.
- Organize: Arrange the elements of the interface so that they fit into logical chunks. This might mean based on a person’s mental model (how they think), or tie in to a more familiar interface pattern.
- Hide: Place the most important elements within reach (make them obvious), and hide the others, making them accessible through navigation.
- Displace: Pushing some of the functionality to another device, or feature, so that the one interface isn’t responsible for displaying every possible interaction.
No apologies if you know this. We just have to keep telling the world.
30% of all published content are lists.
The most viewed posts are list posts. Period. Bloggers know this. Publishers knows this. But what are your doing about it? Why arent you using lists are a type of content marketing?
Lots of bloggers have written on the value of lists. Here’s a collection of posts explaining why people love and hate list. Yes some people hate lists.
List of why people Love Lists & why people Hate lists
A Collection of posts and research on the value of list-based posts.
Some love lists, some hate them
- crowd rank
- curated
- alpha
- newest
- queue
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5 Reasons that List Blogs (Do Not) Suck - @DanielNewmanUV
Just recently I ran across or should I say stumbled across (Social Media Joke) a few posts and/or Twitter dialogues that were lashing out against list blogs. You know these blogs, they start with a topic and then list them off in order. For example, The 5 best, 10 worst, or I dunno 12 Most.
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10 Reasons Why We Love Making Lists : NPR
Why is it that everywhere you turn there's a list for this or that? On Facebook, friends recently began posting 25 Random Things About Me - which bloggers have been doing for years. Now some people are lambasting the listiness while others are shortening it to a more manageable 3 Random Things (3 Places I Have Lived or 3 TV Shows I Watch).
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HRmarketer.com Blog: Listmania and Social Influence | @hrmarketer | @el4short
Last week the HR Twitter world was ablaze with the release of John Sumser's latest "Top 25 Online Influencers in Recruiting" list. It's the fifth edition of John's popular ranking, but the first time he's used our Social Ears to compile it.
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21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic | @randfish
A considerable portion of my consulting time has recently revolved around the optimization of corporate blogs (or the addition of blogs to revamped sites). As usual, I find a pattern emerging in the strategies that need attention and the pitfalls that must be avoided.
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6 Types Of Posts That Drive Traffic | @IncomeDiary
I've been experimenting for some time now on different types of posts, to see how they drive traffic to my site in different ways. From the use of Google Analytics and my experience, I've managed to compile a list of the 6 different types of posts I write, ordered by the amount of traffic they drive to my site and I have to say, I was a little surprised by some of the results.
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65 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog | @problogger
This guest post is by Satrap of BlogStash.com. What is the best way to drive traffic to my site? What's the fastest way to generate traffic to my site? What's…? We all want to know the best way to drive the greatest amount of traffic to our sites.
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5 Top Reasons Why Lists Are Good For Getting Traffic To Your Blog | @MaheshKukreja
This is a guest post! If you want to write for us, check out the Guest Post section. Do you want an innovative method to get people to link to your blog? All you have to do is write lists. There are several reasons why lists are a great method to get renewed traffic to your blog.
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A New Era For Social Interest Sites: Twitter, Tumblr & Pinterest Go Big In 2011 | @TechCrunch | @eldon
One of the most interesting trends in comScore's 2011 social networking report is the new growth of social sites that cater to users' interests, rather than their real-life social graphs. In particular, according to comScore data, microblogging platforms Twitter and Tumblr have had break-out years, and they've been joined by new online pinboard site Pinterest.
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5 Vital Reasons to Use List Posts | @Nicholas_Cardot
One of the very first posts that I published on Site Sketch 101 was titled "14 Ways to Increase Your Blog Traffic." Within days that article had received dozens of twits and quickly began to rise in page hits.
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7 Reasons Why You Should Use List Posts On Your Blog! | @TheBadBlogger
(Left Photo Credit to: jirvinphotography) There's been some debate in the blogosphere about whether or not list posts make for good blog posts. On one hand, you have the advocates, who say that list posts earn them more traffic, and on the other, you have bloggers saying that list posts are boring and lazy.
I don’t think anybody disputes List posts attract more eyeballs.
All these are the reason listly exists.
Listly appeals to people for all the same reasons with the added bonus that Listly involves the crowd. Listls lets your scale, but better than that it brings in people who care about your domain. Listly cultivates emotional engagement/community on the Web and in the real world.
Listly is connecting people with passion. Lists help you create, curate and moderate great content. We let you build community around your content by fostering a deep sense of emotional engagement.
So why aren’t you using lists? Why aren’t you using Listly?
Image Credit: jdhancock via Flickr.com an Creative Commons
