Blog flair backlash

It’s now official: right-minded people hate those little “Blog me, digg me, add me to your feed baby!” icons attached to blog posts. References:

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/93-its-the-content-not-the-icons
http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2006/10/10/mooching_20/
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000587.html

Maybe I’m part of the problem. I avoid the Nascar-style decorations, but I do have text links at the bottom of each post that cover three such sites. My links are tasteful, of course – no icons, just gray text. Faster than a bookmarklet, even, since you can use them right from the front page of the blog. But I do feel mixed about them.

For the next version of my blog (coming Real Soon Now), one of my goals is to reduce the total number of links on a page. I took one stab at this by filtering my tag cloud (it only shows tags that have been used four or more times), but more drastic steps are needed.

Dynamically-generated content definitely carries its own special design risks. It’s easy for an end user of blogging software to be enticed by the idea that with a single plugin they can add 23 bookmarking icons to EVERY post they’ve ever made – even if that is, objectively, a terrible idea.

Jared Kuolt commented on Tue Nov 14 16:47:16 2006:

I thought it was just me that hated those icons. Thanks for the links.