Gather round, kiddies.  Let me tell you a story.

It’s about a place – a magical place!  A place where bacon – yes that’s right, bacon – flows like water.  Not just any bacon either, but every kind of bacon imaginable.  Thick bacon, thin bacon, smoky bacon, sweet bacon, spicy bacon, fatty bacon, lean bacon, bacon candy…you get the picture.  You like bacon, don’tcha?  Yep.  I thought so.

Not only that, at this magical place there are fascinating bacon speakers – bacon poets, bacon writers – and even some bacon music to boot.  Think of it like delicious, porky Hogwarts.

I know, kids, I know.  Sounds…wonderful.  Well, what if I were to tell you that such a place exists?  You’d probably tell me I’ve lost my lardons and need a pig knuckle to the head.  But it does!  It does exist…and you can go.

It’s called Camp Bacon, and it’s an event unlike any other, put on by beloved culinary icon Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  And it’s this weekend – Saturday July 2nd, starting at 8:30 am (there are 4 days of bacon related festivities surrounding the main event as well).

Short notice, I know!  But there is literally no better way to celebrate your American freedoms than by demonstrating – repeatedly – your right to consume massive amounts of delicious, wonderful bacon, at Camp Bacon.  If you can make it, get your ham hocks in gear to Ann Arbor and live the dream.

Ahhh, the Top 10 list.  Immortalized by Letterman, and more recently the go-to device for blog writers short on content.  When they provide actionable information, they can be quite valuable, but too often these days they’re lazily thrown together to meet the content deadlines of a writer against the clock.  No biggie – except that when they happen to be negative lists (“Top 10 Worst ____ Ever!”) they often unnecessarily alienate readers, hurt businesses, and cause more harm for the publication than good.

This came to the fore with a Zagat blog post from June 15th entitled “The 10 Lamest Things You Can Order in a Restaurant”.  In it, writer Kelly Dobkin outlines a list of 10 rather innocuous items (bottled water, wedge salads, shrimp cocktail?) you might find on a restaurant menu and labels them all “lame” for various reasons, primarily either because you can make the item for cheaper at home or because the item is, according to the article, outdated.

While Ms. Dobkin and Zagat are entitled to their opinions, so are readers.  And readers were not impressed. At the time of this post there were 44 comments ranging from “Worst Top 10 List ever” to “Without a doubt the stupidist lameo diva self absorbed article I’ve ever seen on the zagat.”  Wow.  They’re quite entertaining, check them out yourself.

The purpose of this post is not to pick on Ms. Dobkin though.  It probably seemed like a harmless idea and a Zagat editor obviously greenlighted the piece.  The purpose of this post is to propose an end to such negative writing, and here’s why:

• Negative Top 10 Lists provide little value to the reader. Unless we’re talking about crowdsourced voting from a user community, the ranking is the arbitrary opinion of one person who has dubious motives for writing the piece (because they have to write something, it’s their job).  In the case of the Zagat piece the aim at generic menu items provides even less value.  What’s a reader expected to do with this information, nod and say “Yeah…screw baked potatoes!!!”…?
• They harm businesses in a flippant manner. What to a writer is simply a hastily conceived post to keep their boss of their back can be a damaging and just plain cruel weapon that can truly harm the dreams of the business owner.  This is not to say that every critique has to be light and fluffy, but think before you post, and this includes user reviews such as those on Yelp.  I suggest most readers depend on critics more to guide them to what’s good than steer them away from what’s bad.  Why?  Because most people deep down empathize with the restaurant and a scathing review just makes them feel bad too.
• They harm the writer and publication themselves! You have only to read the comments on the Zagat post, or some of you may remember the post from David Tamarkin in Time Out Chicago on the “5 restaurants that (TV show) Check, Please! got wrong”.  The comments are no longer visible but, trust me, it wasn’t pretty.  More often than not readers take it as snark and as the writer telling them what to like, as opposed to the writer telling them what the writer likes.  It’s guaranteed someone will like what you’re ripping on and speak up to defend it, making you and the publication just look like Debbie Downer.  It’s not worth it, idea-starved blog writer!

What do you think – are you sick of negative Top 10 Lists like me?