Why weighted lists didn't work for us

As Jeffrey pointed out, it seems that weighted tag lists are the new fad. While these can be effective tools in communicating additional information to linked sources they are certainly not the right solution all of the time. This is something we discovered when we considered adding a weighted keyword list to Digital Web Magazine. Through some discussion with various staff members and users it was very apparent that while weighted lists did draw attention to the most popular items on the list, it also introduced a self-perpetuating problem, the same kinds of problems you see with things like "most popular" lists. In simplified form the metric to which visual prominence is established is often exponentially increased when presented to the common user who is a browser. In essence, push was it already being pushed. Those are the user experience problems with weighted lists, I won't even begin to mention the accessibility problems with them (though there are some solitions to those problems). (Via Digital Web Magazine)