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How can you tell when a journalist is trying to pull a fast one? Let me answer in the form of the Top Five Ways You Can Tell a Journalist Is Pulling a Fast One. #1: They present their answer in the form of a list.

The problem with the Top 10 format and its derivatives (the top 50, the five worst, the back nine) is that they promise an empirical study, but what they usually represent is a bunch of editors sitting around a room, trying to drum up something catchy.

Nine times out of 10, there's nothing really methodical about them, but people love the things. There's a reason the format has conquered every medium, from dinner-hour entertainment news ("The Five Scraggliest Celebrity Beards of 2007!") to the ladies' mags ("Thrill Him With The 17 Most Improbable Positions Ever!").

But no medium has thrown itself bodily at the art of iffy lists like the Internet. If lists have proven themselves the ideal format for puffy filler in other media, just think of how they play online, where puffy filler is the main course. In the social-media circuit, where people spend their time recommending pages to one another in a bid to while away the hours, they're huge.

Witness Popurls.com, a site that surveys other social-news sites for top stories. Unlike the examples above, which I shamelessly made up (how apropos), a collection of very real, very inane lists unfolds here: The "Top 15 science fiction books series," the "10 most Insane, Child-Warping Moments of the '80s" - and on and on.

The format is popular amongst bloggers, who are always looking for some trick to draw in readers. Successful blogs foster a regular readership the same way any other publication does: good content, delivered regularly. But if a blog can get one of its articles noticed by a social news site, it can earn itself a sudden influx of thousands of readers.

I call it the distractosphere: that province of the Internet that's entirely dedicated to attracting bored readers with shiny trinkets. But it was only the other day, when a piece from an outlet called Cracked.com suddenly became popular, that I realized the jig might finally be up. The piece was called "The 10 Lamest Dinosaur Names." Apparently there was such a thing as a "bambiraptor." Who knew?

What seems like the bottom of the barrel for lists, however, could really be the tip of the iceberg.

You might remember Cracked as a second-tier knockoff of Mad Magazine that once graced the lower echelons of supermarket racks. Founded in 1958, the magazine was chiefly memorable for shamelessly aping MAD's format, only with less discernible humour.

Readership petered out as the decades wore on. In 2006, the magazine attempted to reinvent itself as a satire of Maxim-style men's mags; this lasted, alas, all of three issues. But the website that was launched to accompany the relaunch soldiered on, and over the past year, has become one of the most prominent humour properties on the Web today.

And Cracked.com is all about lists. Up this week: "History's 10 Most Terrifying Contraceptives" (#3: Lemons), "6 Endangered Species that Aren't Endangered Enough" (#6: the Goliath Bird-Eating Spider), "8 'Self-Help' Books That Will Do Nothing of the Sort" (#1: The Secret). After reading its will-it-into-being philosophy, writes Cracked, "all that we managed to will ourselves into was an aneurysm."

They're funny, but it's not satire of the sort you'd find on The Onion. Instead, as Jack O'Brien, the 27-year-old editor of Cracked.com, puts it, they're "reality-based": real facts assembled and given an entertaining spin. It's more like a guided tour of Wikipedia.

The format evolved organically, O'Brien says. Editors noticed that "reality-based," list-formatted pieces were just as funny as satirical fiction, but better read. When the site was acquired in 2007 by Demand Media, a social-media company, its new owners "looked at the numbers" and told Cracked to run with what worked.

The site's features were all-list from that point on, and monthly readership jumped into the millions. The format, says O'Brien, is good for their target audience: workplace readers, looking for articles that can be digested in bite-sized chunks over the course of a day.

Even more interesting is how Cracked gets its content in the first place. When editors noticed that many of their contributors were coming from a Web forum called, astutely enough, Pointless Waste of Time, Cracked purchased the forums outright, brought its creator on board, and started using its hundreds of members as a talent farm.

Anyone who signs up and expresses interest is given access to a hidden, behind-the-scenes forum at Cracked.com, where denizens bat around ideas for future Cracked lists with one another. Editors trawl the forums for promising candidates, and when they find good ones, the forum member who came up with the idea is commissioned to write it as a piece of paid freelance work.

The result is content of impressively consistent funniness. Cracked lists, with their offbeat research and finely honed snark, have become fixtures on social media sites like Digg and MetaFilter, which can direct thousands upon thousands of readers with a single link.

To boot, it's also an unwitting satire of every other trumped-up list that media outlets, online and off, use to drum up attention, a clarion call of ridiculousness. A format that works so well for weight-loss tips and spring fashions can surely be applied with equal gravitas to the 10 worst-named dinosaurs.

In fairness, mind you, whoever came up with the name "bambiraptor" had it coming.