2013 Year in Review Lists in Review

I’ve had a Tumblr account for a long time but never had done anything with it. Guess I couldn’t think of anything worthy of tumbling.

But every December I toy with an idea to aggregate as many Year in Review lists that I can find. As a former writer and editor of such lists, I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with the things. They’re easy to complete since any research is all internal, but they’re difficult to create since you need to find the stuff that readers would actually want to reminisce with.

Today, every media outlet cranks these end-of-year lists out. Online, lists are obviously the content du jour. They’re easy for a staff to complete during what’s usually a down-time of year, and they tend to drive some traffic during what’s also generally a low point in the year, in terms of site visits. And we all know sometimes lists go viral.

So the other day it occurred to me: 2013 lists + Tumblr = the perfect aggregation format. I created Listwatcher. Let’s see how many unique end-of-year lists we can find…