For a while I wondered why NYTimes.com shows a list of the "most e-mailed" articles as its measure of Most Popular, rather than simply most viewed. It does seem to work pretty well, but surely leaves out the voices of a large number of readers who never e-mail articles.

The other day the answer occurred to me: the "most viewed" list would probably read like the tabloid version of the Times. After all, look at the stories featured on Buzzfeed, which aims to identify the most popular trends and measures their popularity (outwardly at least) by number of clicks. It's pretty much a collection of the trashiest, dumbest stuff on the internet. Well...this is the internet, that's probably an exaggeration. But it's certainly toward that end of the spectrum. Jason Kottke serves as their design advisor, and the feed of four stories on the front page of kottke.org is, to me, an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise great site. There's a fine line between the wisdom of crowds and the mob mentality.