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At the beginning and end of my work day I like to take about 20-30min in total to check out what's new on programming.reddit.com and dzone.com, 2 programming link aggregators I like to check out on what's new in the "industry", or maybe just to check out a cool tutorial that people just love to share now a days (thank you all for that), and I have to admit that even thou a lot of these posts have just some generic and basic tips, I am drawn to see what others have to share with their "ten ways to do this, or ten programs to do that" kind of posts.

We are drawn to things that come in a big volume

I for one think that it has to do with the perception of depth that comes from us reading that there is more than one tip, or more that one program or programming advice or piece of code, and in the unstable economic times that we live today we are drawn more and more to getting more bang for the buck, more information per posts, everything just has to come in bigger and bigger numbers.

This phenomenon is present in our daily lives

I look around in my city and I find it a bit funny when I see a lot of signs with "buy 3 pizzas and you get one free, or get some free fries to go with your bought drink", or the hypermarkets who battle in free stuff for larger quantities, and although it's marketing they are doing and it's sales they are after, it's funny how this type of marketing affects so many ares of our lives, including our daily browsing.

My take on this kind of marketing

I embrace this kind of marketing in programming and design links now, partly because of lack of time to read or track down a lot of individual posts, but at the same time I feel like I am being bombarded by new sites that pop up every week with marketing titles and posts that get a lot of clicks from linking to good blog posts that have a lot of original content, and a lot of them are already blogged and linked about by more established sites.

My confessed change in attitude

Since I started blogging myself, I started being more appreciative of good, original, single topic blog posts, rather than feeling good about seeing ten article titles displayed on a page, calling me to click to see what's "the latest and greatest from this past month" so in a way I feel like I should be more selective in clicking on these kind of posts, and instead read single posts that bring more depth to the content, give more value and are more personal than posts that give "10 short advises or 20 blogs posts that are the hottest thing for the month of whatever", because in the end I found myself wanting to subscribe to the rss, twitter, newsletter and maybe other social media buttons, of websites that have great individual posts, are backed up by credible authors, and are built around giving the best advice for free or freemium, than just adding myself to the latest cat on the block who only links to other people's content because they have almost nothing to post that is of their own content, and unfortunately I have started to see a lot of these wordpress based blogs that bring almost no personal value except for linking to other blogs.