The REAL irony is the title of this post: "5 great examples of popular blog posts that you should know". It falls EXACTLY into your group of "XXX (the more the merrier) great examples of objects being rounded up with unique common characteristic".
There is a huge difference between collecting links to say "here they are -- look at me!" and collecting links to say "hey! look at the content of this link!". Most of the former start with a number -- hence the 5, 10, 20 ego-camp. Most of the latter tend to contain interesting content.
You're also exchanging links with blogs that do the same thing you're writing against. You shouldn't promote those blogs if you feel so strongly against the practice. That being said, I agree with you that any post collecting a bunch of links is a disgusting practice.
higher quality regurgitation. i see smashing magazine as a quality filtering aggregation subscription with occasionally good original content, and i see things like a list apart and alertbox as consistent high quality original content.
thing is, some good stuff makes it to the places that can't be relied on to perpetually produce high quality content, and places like smashing help point out where it is.
for me, hacker news is another filter subscription for the internet which also occasionally has great original content right here. i remember seeing some posts here earlier in the week saying this was a social site....maybe for some, but for me it's a high quality subscription to the internet in general, which replaced previous lower quality filters like reddit.
Well, I think there is room for every kind of post, but Smashing Magazine does roundups WAY better than anything else. What I was saying is if you're going to try to be another Smashing Magazine, just link to Smashing and give up :)
Perhaps the takeaway here is that one of the top marketing blog commandments - Thou Shalt Post Something Every Day - is slavishly obeyed by so many that we are awash in trite content of little real value.
Arguably, this was the case long before blogs came along, as evidenced by a look at the magazine rack of any supermarket, but the internet has certainly exacerbated that. Indeed, the whole reason for sites like Metafilter or even HN is that they consistently perform dual functions of content discovery and crap filtration which are beyond the capability of most individual editors. Few are given the capacity to be both prolific and consistently profound.
tl;dr the more frequent your blog posts, the less impact they make.
The simple fact is that as long as such posts attract hits, people will keep writing them. Better to just ignore them and focus on creating and consuming good content. It could be time to start filtering my RSS feeds to remove any entries that start with a number...
More than unoriginal blogs, I hate blogs that have a list of a billion ads across the top -- particularly when more than half of them are empty squares that just say "advertise here." If you can't sell ad spots, at least don't show them to me.
In most cases and for most occasions there are enough resources out there. So why write something "new" when you can just link 10 or more of such articles?
If you don't have anything to add, compile a list instead of just repeating.
Check out the posts on that site http://briancray.com/blog/ How is he any better?