Why Do We Care About Top 10 Lists?

December 28, 2007 at 11:15 am | Posted in 1652, Attention Management, collaboration, communication, Content Management, RSS, XML Syndication | 3 Comments

Well, it’s that time of the year when the top 10 lists take over the front pages.  Those of you who read this blog regularly (yes, both of you) know that I tend to focus on communication, collaboration, and content technology and, sure enough, I’ll be bringing this all around to that at the end. 

A quick scan shows that Time magazine published 50 (fifty!) top 10 lists here: 50 Top 10 Lists of 2007.  Hmmm – that’s just a categorized top 500 list, isn’t it?  I don’t have time to get through that much – let me know if they publish a “top 10 ‘top 10 lists’ ” and I’ll take a look.  Wired’s homepage today has The Top 10 Heartbreaking Gadgets of 2007, The 10 Best Gadget Ads of 2007, and Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs of 2007. Perhaps the best of all is The Onion’s What the Hell Just Happened?

I think there are two kinds of readers who enjoy these lists.  The first is people that follow the subject in question and want to see how the author’s list (supposedly some kind of expert) jibes with theirs to validate their views, give them something to gripe about, or point out a few things they may have missed.  Movie buffs love to see the “top 10 films of the year” list to see if they should brag to their friends about their good taste or slam the critic as obviously out of touch.

I want to focus on the second kind of reader doesn’t follow this subject and likes the top 10 lists because it provides a year’s worth of news in a handy capsule.  For these readers the top 10 list acts as a filter to all the noise that occurs during the year.  If you are stuck in with kids all day and don’t get out to the movies, the list is a handy way to fill up your Netflix queue for next year (after a 6 month lag or so for the DVD to come out). 

Now, wouldn’t it be handy if, rather than once a year, that filter was always in place?  I could subscribe to this filter and instruct it to alert me only when a top-10-worthy film, or classical CD, or news story comes out?  And to remove the noise by not bothering me with the lesser films, CDs, or news in the meantime?  It’s hard to guess what will exactly equal 10 by the end of the year, but I’d accept say 15-25 items and a dial to increase or decrease the sensitivity if I’m getting too many/few each year.

I’m bringing this up because I see the “top 10 list” phenomenon as a good analogy to what a slew of technologies at the intersection of portals, RSS, and social software are trying to do: filter out all the noise and just bring me the important information, encapsulated, all in one handy spot.  It is a commonly recognizable form of attention management.

The process for assembling this is the same whether it’s Time coming up with a top 10 list, a blogger filtering news to find just the important stuff worth posting about, or the rules engine for an enterprise attention management system that is trying to find important events and pull them forward into the user’s focus.  The process consists of:

Integration: Connecting up with all the event streams, information sources, and data

Categorization: Determining what subject the event falls into

Rating: Prioritizing this bit of news.  This is probably the toughest part of the process at the moment, but attempts have been made in the form of social ratings engines (Digg) and attention profiling (APML).

Personalization: Lining up the category against the set of subjects that you are personally interested in, either through explicit declaration or implicitly. 

Display: A UI that presents the user with capsules on each of the items and allows the user to notice, track, and manage the information

This process is even more important in the enterprise, where the stakes are higher than missing a good opera CD.  How do you create your own “competitive news critic”, “financial event critic”, or “sales critic” to pick the most important information for you and how do they encapsulate this information and display it for you?  It could be the head of each of these departments flagging important news and alerting others to it (hopefully not just through email).  It could be through social ratings of important events.  It could be through automated alerting mechanisms that work off of triggers or rules.  No matter how it’s done, having an enterprise Roger Ebert to pick the best (and worst) as it happens and a good display channel (like Roger Ebert’s newspaper column) to present the information is as useful in a noisy enterprise environment as it is in a noisy entertainment environment. 

With everyone focusing on top 10 lists, I’m hoping this “angle” helps an evangelist for RSS, portals, social software, or attention management to make their case in a way that will resonate with business partners and executives during the New Year’s season. 

Happy New Year!