David Letterman is not Tim Berners-Lee, or even Al Gore

I know.

You actually read all those top ten or top seven or top five lists. I do. Everyone does.

Not surprisingly, people have a weird prediliction for the easily digestible. (Which explains Smartfood popcorn, which manages to contradict itself twice within its own brand name, but that's beside the point.) A top ten list of things I have to know or do or be careful of certainly sounds like it's going to tell me things I'm going to have to do or know or be careful of, which means I'm more likely to click on it. Titles like that shout, "Hey you! Busy digitally empowered middle manager! Read me because you don't have time to read! I will grant you valuable and easily actionable information that will improve your career prospects and/or your pay level!"

And, um, teh Google certainly seems to like them.

But people. Really. Everything that y'all are posting tells me that y'all've been taking those LinkedIn discussions and eHow tips on how to "generate content" a little too seriously.

Not everything deserves to be crammed into the "top whatever" format. My friends, even social media has more than seven or ten things that you need to know about it, and yet every day there seems to be another link to somone pontificating about those oh so few essential things. And I'm damn sure that there are more than ten things you need to know about Moby Dick, or baking bread, or the Bible, or global climate change, or investing, or whatever, let alone The Simpsons or Family Guy.

So remember, when it comes to that link about social media you find on Twitter, every other busy digitally empowered middle manager is reading the same shallow crap, and tweeting about it, and thinking it's going to change his/her business in some sort of vaguely differentiating way.

David Letterman and Merrill Markoe and the gang invented the Top Ten for your amusement, not for the information superhighway, and certainly not as the primary way for you to attempt to understand the world around you.

Besides, everyone knows that the only useful top ten list was this one – Top Ten Rasta Expressions or Baseball Chatter.