There's something very wrong with our modern popular culture. It's not just our nation's unhealthy obsession with making celebrities out of talentless nobodies, which I referred to in my IT Week blog recently. It's also our curious fascination with league tables, with ranking everything in sight as if that's the only way to prove something's worth.

It's absurd that an issue as complex as the education system, for example, can be reduced to the simplistic level of a league table measuring the performance of schools, universities and colleges. Just another irritation for middle-class parents to complain about over their Pinot Grigios, I suppose.

It stalks us in TV land too, this curse. No need to actually seek out and commission genuine talent to research, write and film an original programme. Oh no, let's just do another "Top 500 most hilarious moments in 'Allo 'Allo involving a large salami, voted for by you". These shows are the lazy programmer's dream: cheap and quick to make, and they can easily be stretched over two nights if they include enough to-camera pieces with some inane host – usually the bloke who used to be in a soap before he got kicked out for being a coke-head.

And the saddest thing is we lap it up, it doesn't seem to matter to anyone that these lists have probably been compiled exclusively by the work experience boy at Channel Five. We sit like lobotomised monkeys in front of the box wondering what could possibly top hilarious moment number 331, when our hero Rene Artois makes a remark about sitting on the horns of a dilemma, or something.

But the one occasion in recent weeks where tables have actually meant something was the IMRG Index from the Interactive Media in Retail Group. This is a regular, rigorously researched and accurate-as-humanly-possible piece of research, which lists the leading 50 online retailers in the UK. No surprises at the top, with Amazon beating all-comers, and online-only retailers dominating the top 10.

I must admit I'd never heard of some of the names in the top 50, but more important were the notable absences – it seems many firms, especially those with a high-street presence, still have a lot to learn about the best ways to attract people to their web sites and persuade them to make a purchase.

There is certainly no shortage of technologies and marketing strategies to make this happen, ranging from the Ajax system to optimise the user experience, to analytics tools, which can focus marketing pounds where they are likely to be most effective.

The big high-street names must learn to achieve that difficult balance between online and offline that the likes of eBay do not have to worry about. And the firms with real shops have one advantage: the IMRG found many customers who shop offline are influenced by research or advertising on the internet. And my top 10 tips for online merchants? I'd be happy to reveal them in a TV special. Channel Five, I'm waiting for your call.