If you nose around the BYU Radio website for a while, you’ll come across a fun little page, with a rather straight-forward title: the Top Talks list, which shows you the most popular Church talks (mostly BYU devotionals) offered for download on the site. There’s both a list for the week so far (the top three as of 3pm EST today were by John Bytheway, President Kimball, and Elder Bednar,) and for all time* (the top three, again as of 3pm EST, were by Elder Bednar, John Bytheway, and Elder Holland.)
But, this list (as fun as it is) suffers from some serious bias, because all it really is, is a ranking by the number of downloads a talk receives — at a minimum, we have to assume that the user base (whose clicks are being counted) is more educated, younger, more American, wealthier, and probably more attached to BYU than the average member of the Church. There’s also a question of self-fulfilling prophecies: the absolute easiest two ways of choosing a talk to listen to are to click on the current week’s most popular talks, or to click on one of the talks from the current month. I’ve contributed clicks to most of those “top” talks, and for no better reason than that they were already popular. In fact, I’ve downloaded some of them twice: once at work (where I get no “real” radio reception, and rely entirely on the internet) and once at home, to stick on my MP3 player. Kind of like Yale Law School, I sometimes wonder if Elder Bednar, Elder Holland, and Brother Bytheway are going to stay on top of that list for no better reason than that they’re already there.
Now, I can think of some ways of making the “Top Talks” page more useful (and sensitive to, at a minimum, the “once a top talk, always a top talk” issue), but I don’t work for BYU Broadcasting, and blogging is more fun if you leave the solution up to commenter participation. So! Given the following constraints, what would be your nominees for a “Top Talks” list?
— The talk should fit into one of the existing categories of BYU Broadcasting talks: something from a church conference, or a church school broadcast. A church agency should own the copyright, basically; it could also be an old church publication that’s now in the public domain, but you get the idea.
— The talk must be available somewhere online right now. That means your favorite article from the Nauvoo Neighbor is ineligible unless you’ve put it out there yourself (or there’s an archive I haven’t found yet.)
— It should also be available in an easy-to-access-and-index-and-link-to format. Yes, the entire original hymnal is indeed available on the BYU libraries website, but only as a collection of high-resolution images. Anything like that, if you really really like it, please transcribe it and put it out there in a .htm or .txt format before linking.
— But, it doesn’t have to be in MP3 format. If it is in MP3 (or other audio) format, it should be the voice of the original speaker. So your Journal of Discourses favorites might be eligible, so long as you’re not linking to a file where your uncle Larry reads it out loud.
— The list should be manageable: I should be able to listen to or read all of them over the course of an easy-going weekend. Think about numbers smaller than 15, basically.
I don’t care if you think your top talks are best suited to members who already own every volume ever printed by Deseret Book (to say nothing of the other guys,) or to recent Seminary graduates, or to Sue and Roger Everymember, though it’d be nice if you shared what your selection criteria were. And I’m not going to put up my own list, because a) I don’t think I can do one that isn’t hopelessly influenced by the most-downloaded list, and b) it’s more fun if you guys do all the hard work.
* – Technically, the scope of the all-time list isn’t clearly defined, but I’m guessing that, assuming about 30 clicks a day for the most popular talk of any given day, you’re looking at something along the lines of two years’ worth of data. This sounds about right, since the service is relatively new. And it doesn’t really matter, when you think about it, because the list is flawed no matter how many weeks’ of data are involved.