In two sites that I regularly read, I found links to this awful thing, once again reinforcing the idea of the inverse of the Long Tail - The Short Fat Head.
Isn’t anyone else tired of seeing the Technorati Top Ten in every top list on the planet? Yes, I know Boing Boing exists; you’d have to be living under a virtual rock not to know. Seriously, if you had any interest at all in rooting out the most popular blogs/sites on the web, then you probably already know that Boing Boing is among them without the help of Dave Winer’s new OPML-sharing project.
It’s not exactly fair to persecute Share Your OPML, since there seem to be a few spiffy features under the hood, but the home page is just another reinforcement that a select few Instapundits, Koses, and Scobles sit at the top and that the common blogger will never attain this level of popularity. In fact, I think part of the idea of sharing the OPML is that you would be exposed to smaller like-minded sites. It’s sad that the home page doesn’t focus on that idea.
It’s a great project where we can all share our feeds and possibly notice not that we all read the same top ten sites, but that a few of us don’t subscribe to one political blog or another, or don’t care to read opinions of pundits who have gained their popularity by speaking out without practical experience.
Yes I’m bitter. There are fantastic writers out there who don’t see this popularity because of what? They haven’t chewed the content and spewed it back in a manner that the public can consume like baby sparrows in the nest?
Isn’t it about time to apply the guillotine to this Short Fat Head?
