Webpages should not contain "add to Digg / Del.icio.us / Technorati /..." links

I don't like pages / articles / blog posts /.. accompanied by "Digg this", "add to Del.icio.us" or "add to Technorati" links.
Why not? Because this is meta level functionality. Not functionality of the blog/article/page in question, but on a higher level. And thus this should be handled on a higher level: the web browser. Just like we can create and manage bookmarks (I mean the old fashioned ones, not the delicious ones) in our browser: this is not the task of a web page. (we all know how silly "bookmark this" links look on a page, right?)

Whether you like these kind of services or not is up to you (personally I think the most popular content is often the most subjective, biased and close minded, not to mention too mainstream for "real" geeks but that's another story) but people who are serious about it should just make sure they can do it for any page they visit (eg use a Firefox extension to enable digging and adding to delicious) so we can get rid of this ugly clutter that is put on some pages.

I know not every browser supports this already (either by default or by extending it with (3rd party) plug-ins) and even if it is, not everyone enables this functionality, so it's a bit a chicken and egg problem.

But then again, most web2.0 people already use a browser that supports it, or will support it in the very near future, so let's get rid of this inappropriately placed meta-functionality !

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Web, content and meta-content
from I wanna spend all your money ... on Sun, 07/08/2007 - 18:04

Dieter_be wrote a blog post about how ‘Webpages should not contain “add to Digg / Del.icio.us / Technorati /…” links‘ and while some of the thoughts he presents are correct, I still have to disagree, here’s why:
Toda...

Submitted by Dieter_be on Sun, 07/08/2007 - 12:38. categories [ ]

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Submitted by Daniel Hofstetter (not verified) on Sun, 07/08/2007 - 14:37.

Interesting thought, I don't have seen it in this way yet. But you are right, these digg, delicious, etc. icons are just clutter. For the services I use, I have added bookmarklets to my browsers.

PS: As we are speaking of clutter, your "subject" field is probably clutter, too. I never know what to insert there ;-)

Haha, yes you're right :-) I

Submitted by Dieter_be on Sun, 07/08/2007 - 14:44.

Haha, yes you're right :-)

I want to allow users to insert a subject, but not oblige them. The problem is Drupal always shows the first words of a post if no subject is given which I don't like. (It should just show no title if none is given) Fixing this is somewhere on my to-do list (towards the end ;-) )

I agree on your separation

Submitted by tante (not verified) on Sun, 07/08/2007 - 18:04.

I agree on your separation of content and meta-content by my conclusions are somewhat different. Since it was a little too long for a blog post comment, I wrote my own entry as a response ;)

That's right! I suppose

Submitted by sanderfiers (not verified) on Thu, 07/12/2007 - 00:30.

That's right! I suppose microformats can be a role in this?

I don't know, I wouldn't

Submitted by Dieter_be on Thu, 07/12/2007 - 20:06.

I don't know, I wouldn't think so but apart from reading a tiny bit about them I don't know how they work so ...

a bit wrong

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 07/25/2007 - 05:55.

i get on average about 15 people a week using my "Bookmark Me" function, most of whom turn into customers a little later.

That's (one of) the idea(s) behind Toolicious

Submitted by Mike Schinkel (not verified) on Wed, 08/01/2007 - 05:06.

Hi Dieter:

I agree. That's (one of) the idea(s) behind Toolicious (http://t.oolicio.us) although once we started it the founding members (me and Ben Coffey) haven't had time to move forward with it. Would really like to get some people who are interested in the concept to push us to spend more time on it. And if that doesn't happen, maybe we'll be able to make time for it sometime soon...

Very nice! What I had in

Submitted by Dieter_be on Thu, 08/02/2007 - 20:19.

Very nice! What I had in mind is just to have all that functionality available in the browser. (this gives some advantages such as they don't clutter your screen when you don't want them to)
Toolicious seems to be a very similar solution for the problem, albeit a (much) more pragmatic one, to the expense of flexibility.

I'm sure this could become a very popular tool...

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