Side project: Listwatcher

For the past few years I’ve toyed with an idea to aggregate as many high quality Year in Review lists that I could find. As a former writer and editor of these lists, I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with the things. They’re relatively easy to complete since any research and editorial is either internal or all creative. Yet at the same time they’re also difficult to produce since you need to find and create stuff that readers would actually want to spend time and reminisce with.

Today, every media outlet cranks out these end-of-year lists. Online, lists are now bread and butter content (looking at you, Buzzfeed). At the end of any year, creating lists are typically easy for teams that are short-staffed during holiday down-times, 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 that now, thanks to social media, sometimes lists go viral anytime of year.

I also have had a Tumblr account for some time, but never had much reason to play around. I have been genuinely curious about the lightweight, smart content tools it gives publishers. So it occurred to me at the end of last year: 2013 lists + Tumblr = a fun side project and maybe an interesting format for the idea. I started the project a bit late, but created Listwatcher and it’s been fun.

What started with the best year-end lists I could find has now turned into a place to capture good, unique lists in general. There are so many, and they’re generally lost to constantly updated Twitter and Facebook feeds. I’m quickly realizing this could go in many different directions with smarter aggregation and curation, and could include various categories and topics, and also multimedia like video, photos, .gifs etc. I’ve got a Twitter handle, but it could benefit from an enhanced social media presence. The Tumblr theme I chose on a whim doesn’t really support content with a more robust structure or taxonomy I could take advantage of. But for now less is more and we’ll see where it goes.

For now, BRING ON THE LISTS!