Let’s face it. Sometimes a nice list with “X” (where X is an integer between 5 and infinity) of the most interesting things you can find about a certain subject is what you feel you need for your readers.

For example: the 10 best applications for the iPhone, the 20 most interesting code snippets for WordPress, the 30 most popular plugins for jQuery, the 50 best sites to inspire all those web designers who fell victim of a pathological decrease of creativity.

This is a sort of widespread mania, typical of a huge number of bloggers, that behind the naive intention to suggest something interesting and useful to their readers, often hides the opportunistic side, of generating traffic to their site, preferably with little to no effort.

Because lists work. They generate traffic, a lot of it. They represent an investment with high return and low risk that sooner or later every blogger will consider.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing intrinsically bad in choosing the utilitarian side moving along the highway rather than the steep and rugged mountain path. I myself often used lists, use them now and will probably use them in the future, just like many others.

At the end of the day, every blog owner can understand that. The typical case is when, after hours of calculations spent in the vain attempt of finding an interesting topic for your next post, you are miserably forced to lean on the safe long list to reenforce the visits to your site which dramatically decreased since your last post, dating back to a couple of days before.

Just to be sure, a nice article with the “ten coolest fonts of the month” is always a hit destined to climb rapidly the top ten links of the day on Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Popurls and so on.

A list of the 10 most interesting cheat sheets is by no means to be underestimated either. But since hundreds of lists like that are already around – they’re almost all the same except for the order in which the links appear – you will have to make an effort to find at least 20, 40, 60 (and multiples) fonts or cheat sheets to be more attractive on the market and make your list really memorable.

This is a classic mechanism that triggers a vicious spiral of atrocities, designed to deliver a list made up of a disproportionate number of links on the topic of your choice. Eventually you will have something humongous, capable of competing with the Google index. And rest assured: it will undoubtedly be successful in terms of visits.

If you’re lucky, you’ll also have the pleasure of tasting the bitter glory generated by the appearance of your beautiful mega list on Digg’s homepage. I say “bitter” because if you’re not well equipped, after 30 seconds, your site will collapse, miserably overwhelmed by a horde of visitors per second comparable to your average daily balance.

And now, left on the table, a question: are those lists really useful in giving more value to a blog? To me, popularity and success of a blog are not measured only by the number of visits, but by the quality of content. That’s why I’d think twice.

What about you?