Anne Truitt Zelenka

Top Ten Sources has a great idea, an idea that the world of blogs and feeds and edge content needs. From their website:

Top 10 Sources is a directory of sites that bring you the freshest, most relevant content on the Web. We know it’s impossible for anyone to keep track of the 20 million+ online sources of information. So our editors search Web 2.0 — blogs, podcasts, wikis, news sites, and every kind of syndicated sources online — by hand. Our Top 10 lists are updated frequently as great new sources come online.

Sounds great! But the implementation disappoints. Important categories like economics and women’s issues are completely missing. Some categories, like motherhood, are far too broad, resulting in uninspired choices. Why not provide a mom humor category, featuring favorites like Dooce and Suburban Bliss? What about the intersection of politics and motherhood, a genre handled admirably by 11D and Half-Changed World? How about offering coverage of reverse-traditional families, working mothers, single moms, and stay-at-home moms? Where are the infertility blogs? And what about moms trying to re-enter the workforce after staying home for a few years? I know a good one for that.

Perhaps TTS has such coverage planned–they’ll get to it eventually. But there are already people in the blogosphere who could provide the inspired lists I’m imagining if only those individuals had a platform. I’m picturing something that offers things like this:

• Allow any “editor” (meaning a registered user) to create, describe, and promote her own top-ten list for a specific category
• Output OPML so readers can import lists of sources into their news aggregators
• Offer reading lists, so that list editors can update their top ten lists regularly and automatically provide fresh, exciting new sources to subscribers
• Allow readers to tag and search the various lists
• Measure and display popularity and quality, perhaps by links and subscriber counts and also by voting
• Consider employing human editors to help polish and promote the lists, ensuring that users can count on a certain level of quality
• Charge a fee. Web 2.0 blasphemy! If you do this, you may get the most serious list publishers, the ones who have a real interest and commitment to providing useful, quality lists.

Of the categories I’ve looked at on TTS, only the Web 2.0 source list provides a reasonable approximation to “top ten” in the category. But no one needs Top Ten Sources for that: we have tech.memeorandum, digg, reddit, and any number of other sites focusing on and filtering that domain. We need top ten lists for all the strange and wonderful categories of the long tail, not yet another site that reproduces and highlights the same old stuff. Umair Haque addresses this in his critique of memeorandum and similar sites:

This is a well-known phenomenon in psych and econ - I’ve been locking myself into a diet of reinforcing information. Nothing really challenges my beliefs, and so I get hyperpolarized, or echo-chambered, sure - but the deeper effect is that I also get stupid, fast.

Part of the reason is that all the attention markets, reconstructors, etc push all the same stuff to the top - they all converge to the same equilbirum. Paradoxically, it’s an environment of incredible diversity, but incredible sameness at the same time.

Without editors who live, work, and eat in the long tail itself, I fear TTS will be yet another site pushing all the same stuff. They do indicate on their website that they’ll allow users to create their own lists in the future. Do a good job with that, and you don’t need to hire people to make lists.

Top Ten Sources is a new venture and yet it looks curiously like old-school media as described by Stowe Boyd here:

So, the Washington Post’s retreat away from the give-and-take in the wilds of the blogosphere — back into the quiet halls of the fifth estate, where our emails and letters can be filtered and flushed — is exactly that: a withdrawal from a more dynamic, participative, and egalitarian model of journalism. And if the Post and other old school players decide not to give us what we want, we can certainly find it elsewhere.

Cheers to the dynamic, participative, and egalitarian model of journalism. Jeers to anyone who says “don’t worry your pretty little head; we’ll figure out what’s important for you.”