It’s probably a deeply human shortcut, but we really often want to know what’s the most POPULAR thing, in whatever category we’re looking at. So i thought I’d do that quickly on a couple of sites. Right now, this is the most popular presentation in english on slideshare with half a million views:
Lots of truth in that one, I’ve seen slides like 36 a number of times…
Almost reaching those dizzying height of views is this collection of “accidents” on docstoc:
Why I Got Fired - Get more Creative Writing
Meanwhile, over at YouTube, Avril Lavigne managed to get over 93,000,000 views on this music video, and on digg.com, the cracking of DRM protection made it to 49,000 diggs.
What does this all say? Well, the most popular stories aren’t necessary the stories of interest to everyone - and in each situation above there is probably a story behind the popularity which promoted that particular item to the top. For the same sort of reasons reason that “yahoo” appears to be the most popular search term on Google, popularity doesn’t mean interest or relevance. But it might be a good pointer, if taken as part of a metric for determining what is “good”.
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