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Numbered lists: top ten, top fifty, 5 best ways to… 10 things you should know about… the list, like most lists – goes on.

Lists are a firm favourite on the Net, as a regular glance at the Digg home page will tell you. What gives us an idea of just how popular some lists are is the fact that Smashing Magazine is being touted by eBizMBA as the 25th most popular blog on the planet! and this is after only one year online for the lords of the lists for web dev resources. Amazing!

As with most sites that achieve a certain success, SM have come in for their share of griping; but lets face it, if it was just a case of amassing large amounts of info from the net then organising it before pressing the publish button, perhaps SM wouldn’t be the only site of its kind that receives nearly 300,000 visits every month, would they?

No, the people behind the site – Sven Lennartz and Vitaly Friedman – aren’t at their first attempt, Sven Lennartz is the owner and chief-editor of Dr.Web which is a 9 year old German site along the same lines, and although SM is a no frills WordPress blog on a sparse theme (Wave Theme according to the footnote – looks like a slightly adapted Simpla theme by Phu Ly, to me), there has been a fair bit of graft and thought gone into it. The fact that some of the stuff has been put out before (by them) takes nothing away from that:

“we have rewritten some of our articles in English and published them on Smashing Magazine to reach a broader audience. Actually, they’ve been published in English, so that you can find the information and use it for your projects“

Fair enough. Well played.