"When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way." So goes the classic lyric from West Side Story, capturing peer pressure in the patois of the time. Now namesake WebSideStory has taken that same urge-to-conform to a whole new level with the release of Publish 4.0, the latest version of its content management application.

Publish 4.0 allows marketers to include or exclude web content based on the behavior of visitors. Content that achieves "most viewed" status can be automatically elevated, while also-rans can be banished to the archives or lost from view entirely. "Popularity is becoming a standard part of the navigation of a website," Steve Kusmer, SVP and GM of WebSideStory's search and content solutions, told ClickZ. "It's like a dynamic site map, showing what most people are doing once they get to a site."

Such power can be used responsibly. Sales performance consultants Miller Heiman is using Publish 4.0 to replace a little-used part of its site navigation with a new "most popular" module highlighting pages, searches and downloads, and to automatically create a list of related pages on the site.

However, though user popularity is important, so is the Long Tail. As Chris Anderson demonstrated in his book of the same name, the web enables access to vast acreage of content that isn't massively popular but is individually so.

Surely, web users would not benefit from web publishers' misusing their new tool to present only "popular" content. We already have a one-size-fits-all, popularity-rules, homogenized web. It's called network television.