We’ve all come across this kind of online feature before: “top 25″ this, “top ten” that, of any subject from skin care products to methods of murder. Most models follow two paradigms for presenting a feature like this. The first is your usual long article, with a jump or pagination, featuring more than one entry per page. A good example will be IHT’s 25 Examples of Good Urban Design (found from: OTB). The other method is to present one entry per method: whether it’s a page or Flash or AJAX slideshow. Some slideshows would be prefaced by short prose before sending the reader through an arduous journey of clicking through page after page of entries, with a photo and two or three sentences for each. Forbes’ The 25 Most Influential Liberals In The U.S. Media would be a representative example. I call this second method the Coffeetable Presentation, because it mimics the content-light nature of coffeetable books. Each chapter in such a book is introduced with a single-page, sparsely written introduction followed by high-quality color photos with tiny, short, but ultimately irrelevant and vapid captions.

Let’s take #25 of the Forbes list, Michael Pollan. The caption:

Writer and journalism professor, University of California, Berkeley

The author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, Pollan has had more influence than any other contemporary writer on mainstream American thinking about what we eat. His manifesto–”Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”–should now be in political vogue. (Obama likes arugula.)

There is no exposition whatsoever about Pollan’s infuence over mainstream American thinking about what we eat. I can argue that Rachel Ray’s ubiquitous cheekbones on a large number of processed food products (delish!) would have a greater “influence over mainstream American thinking abotu what we eat.” I can spend some time explaining why I think so. What does not fly is that it is because I said so. I don’t have numbers, so I can’t say how commonplace the appeal to authority has become in online writing. I can only say that among feature writers in Larger Media it is one of the most glaring errors they commit.

Let’s take in good faith the need for an appeal to authority in a caption. Perhaps there are word counts to not exceed, right? My great problem with Coffeetable Presentations stems from the inability to request a full list of the featured items. I will not groan over such a presentation if there is such a link that says “see the full list,” or even in the coarsely worded “click here to see all entries.” But too often in my experience, no such link exists.

It prevents fast scanning of the content, subjects the reader to wait times for each request, and makes it difficult to jump from one point of info to the other. I wonder, to what end is all this mousing about clicking, and the only reason that makes sense is that it allows the content provider more opportunities to serve out ads. Some might think that’s as good a reason as any, but I don’t think so.