268 words you shouldn't miss

I have a dozen of sites which I regularly follow via feeds. Today I went on a hunt for new blogs and magazines to subscribe to and was overwhelmed by a quite prominent trend among web development and graphich design blogs: it seems like everyone is writing articles with titles like “[put a number here] [put a random power word here] [put a noun here]”.

Some examples that I found today: 101 Awesome Portfolio Sites, 30 Most Inspirational Blog Designs, 58 Wonderfully Cute Illustrated Monster Characters, 25 Examples of Creative Navigation, 80 Graphic Design Links You Can’t Live Without, 32 Examples of Websites with a Brave colour Scheme

I could go on forever…

What’s quite interesting with many of these articles is that they often link to either the same resources (with small variations) as other articles do (it’s like all those CSS galleries which all showcases the same sites) or to each other (modern link farming?). They often doesn’t contain much more than links and/or screenshots, i.e. it’s a quite cheap way of writing an article (but maybe it’s a rewarding type of article in terms of readers?). It also seems like the numbers in the titles are increasing. The first articles of this type that I read linked to 5-30 resources, nowadays we’re approaching three digits. I feel that the strength of such articles is edulcorating. Don’t misinterpret me now, I do like this kind of articles when they’re genuine, but hasn’t it to some point gone out of hand?