Sinister: Anyone for "best of" lists?

[Honey]

Mark said:

> is anyone up for "best of" lists, e.g. "Top 25 Albums of the Decade", 
> "Top 50 Songs of the Decade", 
> "Top 10 Guitarists", "Songwriters", etc.?  

Erm...  We've had "lists of lists" episodes on Sinister before (and
in fact "lists of lists of lists") and it's not been good for the
coherence and readability of Sinister: see, it's very easy to wham out
a list of "things I like" with little thought and send it off, so
potentially we might have 1000 of them in each of our mailboxes by
tomorrow morning.  And 1000x1000=a lot of mails.  I've seen this
decimate other lists in the past and lead to a very low signal-to-noise
ratio, and everyone suddenly starts hitting "delete" and doesn't ever
stop.  So we all start mailing stuff blind and not hearing what each
other say.  Then the sun explodes and life on earth ceases to be.

My take on this is as follows: you can't do much with a simple list of
"Top 50 Songs" from someone, and if any debate at all ensues it's
usually of the "you're kidding, it's complete shit" family, which is
fun for 10 minutes but tires a bit by next August.  So here's the
age-old rule: if you're going to send in a list to Sinister, take the
time to pepper it with *reasons why*, which do encourage debate, and
add a bit of yourself into it.  But please we don't want 500 mails
which say:

Hi losers, your lists all suck, here's mine:

1. Abba: The Best Of
2. Roger Whittaker: The Best Of
3. Motorhead: The Gentle Side Of
4. Boney M: The Very Best Of The Best Of
5. Chris Leonard: Fruits Of The Forest

And Bay City Rollers kick ass too.  Bye, Miss H xx

No disrespect to Mark by the way: Mark, the other way of doing this,
because lists are made for browsing, is for you to offer to receive all
these lists from people, compile them into a single list, and put up on
the WWW, rather like Lovely Laura LLew's Lovely Literary Lovely List -
I'd be happy to put a link on the Sinister page to it as long as it was
an ongoing thing.  It could be Mark's Marvellous Measuring Machine or
something.

Honey x
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