It never fails.
Really it doesn’t. Whenever a new Web 2.0 or social media service starts getting a lot of attention someone somewhere will figure out how to create a ranking scale for that service. The latest incident to get everyone’s pundit shorts in a knot is the new Frienderati addition to Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop site and how it seems to be a hand picked list of the top people on FriendFeed.
While there has been plenty of talk on FriendFeed about the new Alltop site it was Rob Diana who actually stepped up to the plate [nw] and wrote how he felt about it and rankings in general. In addition to his points about Frienderati he also raises the fact there there is a new service from aideRSS called PostRank that allows us to see how individual posts in the blogosphere are ranked. This will require feed readers that can utilize the PostRank API but like Rob says “… just how many ranking systems do we need”.
As much as I agree with much of what he has to say about bloggers and all the different ways available to rank both our blogs and the posts we write I get the feeling that he is more interested in the larger question of why we even need rankings in the first place
I guess my problem is that we probably have enough rankings to follow already. Do we really need an API for one? People are always going to be creating these lists, do we need to try and deconstruct them or even invalidate them? Can we just talk about good content?
To answer Rob it all boils down to one extremely simple fact – it’s human nature. If there is something going on that involves more than one person we will by our very nature find someway to figure out who is the best and who is the worst and every stop in between. It doesn’t matter if it is sport or if it is wine making we’ll always come up with a top 10 list. We do it with movies, music and right through to things like hurricanes.
Rankings are inevitable.
They aren’t going to go anywhere.
After all if we didn’t have them how would we be able to pick out the top 10 music CD’s or top 10 books we would want to take with us to a desert island. Not to mention the top 10 reasons why we don’t need rankings.
Conversation Tags: blogging, leaderboards, rankings
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