Friday Five: top 5 top 10 lists of the moment

‘Tis the season for year-end lists.

Bloggers everywhere are compiling their annual best-of lists, expressing their take on the year’s music, movies, books, blogs, communications faux pas, or any other topic that strikes their fancy. Never one to ignore a trend, but also never an early adopter, I give you five lists of 10s that recently jumped out at me from the RSS.

  1. Neilsen’s top 10 social networks, based on traffic. (MySpace is tops, followed by Facebook.)
  2. The year’s 10 best new and improved apps to make life and work more productive, according to Lifehacker. The blog also gives readers a chance to weigh in with their own picks.
  3. Via Adlab, 10 forces that shape headline writing. Important tips for writers who are still trying to come to terms with the fact that we’re now writing to catch the attention of machines as well as the attention of actual humans.
  4. Before you purchase that Powerball ticket, read CNET’s 10 reasons why you’d miss working. It may make you reconsider your purchase. Or not.
  5. And finally, Web Worker Daily offers its picks for the top 10 books for web workers in 2007. Glad to see a couple of my favorites from the past year — Lois Kelly‘s Beyond Buzz and Gina Trapani’s Lifehacker (which originated from a wonderful blog) — made the list.

Coming soon: a little year-end list of my own.

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Now playing: The Rakes – Little Superstitions
via FoxyTunes

Friday Five: four useful tips from other bloggers, plus one other thing

I like it when blog posts use lists. (Not everyone agrees with me on this, as you’ll see if you keep reading.) I’m a sucker for “Three ways to…” and “Seven new ideas for…” headlines. I’ll read just about any list — or at least scan it. Sometimes, the information is even useful, like the stuff I’ve listed here.

Four tips to keep online marketers from tricking users.

The seven deadly sins of instant messaging, from 43 Folders.

10 ways to be more than a blip in the blogosphere, from the Washington Post, via Micro Persuasion.

10 truths of marketing in a web 2.0 world.

One dissenting view: Enough with the lists. “I’ve grown to hate the list-ification of information,” writes Basement.org. Via 43 Folders again.

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Now playing: Bloc Party – Little Thoughts
via FoxyTunes