Heh, good point.

"5 absolutely must read books for every web designer"

"10 signs of professional web design (Or why you should drop your amateur web designer)"

"9 compelling reasons to build a single-purpose website"

Brian, I agree with your sentiment, but ... kettle, black?

Tu quoque

I figured someone would point that out. And here's my response:

If you look at all of those posts, they are my original opinion. I'm not simply collecting links and saying "Here it is." That's the difference.

But you ARE just collecting links and saying "here they are".

http://briancray.com/2009/06/13/5-web-tools-user-experience/ Just a link with a "sign up for free" blurb.

http://briancray.com/2009/05/04/5-books-web-professionals/ Two sentence synopsis' with a link to Amazon.

http://briancray.com/2009/07/27/eye-tracking-studies-influen... Two sentence synopsis' with a link to the REAL content.

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.

Evdawg: That title was an intentional mockery.

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.