1. In any list of 10, five of them will be so ridiculously obvious that putting them on a list at all is evidence that you're a goddamned time-wasting idiot with no originality, no creativity, and just enough intelligence to complete an elementary school assignment.
2. Nothing shows that you care like making numerous mistakes in spelling and grammar. Yeah, I know teh interwebs is pretty casual about these things, but as long as you're pretending to be an expert about something even remotely significant, you may as well run the sentence through spell check before millions of Digg, StumbleUpon, or Google users become aware that you write like you're repeating fourth grade. This doesn't apply to non-native speakers, of course; I'm sure the French would be totally cool about me posting a knowledgeable blog full of misspelled and grammatically-incorrect francais.
3. Have I covered originality? Maybe spending seven seconds on a search engine will show that every single thing you have to offer has been done, and probably better than the way in which you were about to do it. This may mean that you can't realize your lifelong dream of posting the ten wonders of the world, the ten greatest hair metal songs of the 80's, or ten things that will make your cat vomit.
4. The main reason that most of these lists exist at all is because people make money off of them. The main reason there are so many, all nearly identical in subject matter and almost universally poorly conceived and executed, is because the income factor is miniscule. When some dipshit discovers that he has to have fifty blogs providing advertising clicks just to make seven dollars a month, the reasonable solution would be to find something better to do with your time. The dipshit answer, however, is to create fifty more, using even fewer demands on his limited time and brain power. So we end up with a gigantic pile of throwaway lists that are about as compelling as the random word-generators that create phishing emails. Why? Because it's the same thing; the phishers are just smart enough to write code to do it for them.
5. A picture is worth a thousand words. A picture that we've all seen a thousand times is worth maybe ten words. A poorly-resized or otherwise mangled picture that we've seen a thousand times is worth negative three words. Nothing brings to life the scale and grandeur of the world's most breathtaking art like a pixellated off-color postage-stamp sized version.
6. I'm tempted to say that you should try to use your own photos whenever possible. But after the millionth crappy photo posted by a semi-pro using semi-pro gear with semi-no experience or artistic eye, I'm willing to soften my stance on both theft and redundancy. As annoyingly ubiquitous as the "10" lists are, the endless half-assed amateur portfolios of art and photography threaten to encourage future generations to abandon visual art altogether. Oh, but the anime versions of popular cartoon characters are an exception- there's so much more mileage left for that brilliant idea.
7. Because, inevitably, to conform to the "10" as the numerical ideal of all things, all these lists will either a) leave out important things, or more likely b) include a few things that don't really belong. This often crosses into opinion and judgment, which is always handled with grace and open-mindedness online. When it's a matter of the top power ballads or worst-dressed reality show personalities, that's one thing...but when it's a list of major historical figures, it's hard to justify putting Gerald Ford alongside Einstein and Ghandi.
8. Just to reinforce my other points, this entry exists only to fill up space.
9. The wonderful online explosion of freedom and creativity had pretty much the effect that a brain-damaged stink bug could have foreseen twenty years ago: there's a lot of useless crap. The people who produce it stopped caring about six minutes after they did it, the ten people who actually found it interesting are now split between those who disappeared and those who moved on to higher expressions of their interests and individuality (such as obsessively cataloging their bookmarked bookmark cataloging sites, or hawking trendy ironic coffee cups or something). Yet like disposable diapers and herpes, these moronic blogs will be here forever (in web terms, forever equals ten months or whenever the host site goes bankrupt and gets bought out by a domain name value-added re-exploiter). You're not chiseling your name onto the marble web memorial; you're spraying illegible grafitti on the underside of a rusty train bridge that crosses a dirt road that is blocked off on both sides.
10. And lastly, becuase it's almost cliche at this point to use your final example to do something outrageously witty and surprising, like listing Homer Simpson as the tenth wonder of the ancient world. The punchline effect can be most effective, if this is the first time your reader had ever seen one and thinks that Reader's Digest is a great source for cutting-edge humor. So your #10 LolCat photo of a fat guy who dressed up a kitty last halloween is probably only funny to you...and you know, I don't think it even is anymore, is it?
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