The new blog clutter?

I’m an advocate for less blog clutter and one thing I’ve been noticing lately is that more and more clients and blogs in general are showing a tonne of social bookmarking icons. If you’re using WordPress, there’s a really nice and easy-to-use plugin called Sociable which does the trick. And if you’re wondering about what are the social bookmarking sites out there, I haven’t heard of some of the 25 sites Sociable gives you the options of showing (with another 25 or so on the way!).

At one point I had an “Add to delicious” (text) link on my blog but I removed it.

Why?

For the casual visitor to my site who may have come from a search engine, someone who doesn’t know what delicious is (and if you find that hard to believe, you’re mixing with a select group of people) an “Add to delicious” is meaningless and even sounds ridiculous.

For visitors who use delicious, they’ll probably have a bookmarklet (button they installed in their browser’s toolbar) which does this for them. You could argue that encouraging them to bookmark it helps your site get more traffic. On the other hand, if you’re writing such good posts they want to refer back to, they’re going to bookmark it somehow.

Having a tonne of icons under each post can clutter up your site (especially if you go for the default of showing all the icons) and is only meaningful to people who use those sites.

I was reminded to post this after reading wg’s post the other day. Andreas agrees and says the new social bookmarking icons are like the buttons for site metadata craze.

Do you find social bookmarking icons helpful? Is there a place for them? Are they being overused (already)?