Behind The List - Best of 2010

I knew all year that we were going to do some kind of "Year end, Best Of" list from the minute we started Type II Cast. Last year, I ran a little survey via YEMBlog and Phish.net collecting what people thought were the "jams of the year." The list was widely varied but I culled through the responses and ranked them by the total votes and a little executive decision. It started as a huge list with a lot of one-off pieces in it, but because I only asked for Number One choices there was a decent consensus.  Seven Below > Ghost was the runaway winner. We ran through the list on TWoL and it was kind of fun. With Type II Cast we have 7 really passionate fans. I knew we could take this to another level. One man's top-10 list is little more than opinion and we all know what opinions are like. With 7 of us we couldn't really let our personal passions sway the groups collective opinion (kinda).

So how would I go about building this list? I'm a believer in Major League Baseball's way of voting on almost everything, it's incredibly fair. So using that as a model we would each submit a list of 10 jams (ranked 1-10, with 10 being the best) so if 12/31 Ghost was the best jam, it would get 10 points. I'd then add all the nominations to a spreadsheet and add up the total points. Once we had that number I added a second layer based on how many nominations an individual song got. Thinking there being if multiple people were voting for it, that should outweigh an individual opinion.

(Time for a disclaimer, I am not a statistician. I only play one on this podcast. I would love for someone to help improve upon this system)

So in the end we had a list of 31 jams that were "nominated." Doing a little Excel computation (average aggregate score x total nominations) I ended up with a "Power" score to break the ties. Those results became the final top 10.

Now with only 7 of us we were able to come up with a definitive "top 3." The difference between #3 and #4 was massive, but #4 and #10 was basically a crap shoot. A lot of feedback today was "What about _______?" And the short answer is, well, we didn't have enough people involved to really determine that. What we do have is a good list that I think we all feel really good about, glaring omissions included.

Thanks for all the feedback, looking forward to discussing it more.

Full Spreadsheet Link