In this time of social media the keyword for you is ‘to share’ with other people on the Internet. This can be largely done by blogging. There is an increasing number of blogs set up by a lot of people in your surroundings. And your goal is to share your thoughts and feelings with everyone on the web. For this need, there are several services for you who can bookmark your website for every Internet user. But this amount of services has been exploded lately. This explosion of services has become visible by the absurd large amount of social bookmarking icons beneath every single blog post.
There is an overload of icons on the bottom of every blog which make it seem like these icons are even more important than the content of the blog itself. These icons cause noise in your blog pages. If you desperately want your blog to be found by people, you should consider writing qualitative articles instead of wasting time with connecting to every single social networking bookmark site.
It becomes even worse for the people who are more or less isolated with social media but still are interested in reading blog articles. What will they think when a blog says ‘Add this to del.icio.us’? They will recognize maybe a few icons, but the most icons will seem meaningless for them. Take a criticized look at those icons to discover that they are certainly a threat to the rules of web-usability. And then remember what the web-usability specialist Steve Krug says, “Don’t make me think”. These icons will do make people think about the meaning of them and why they are always there screwing up the blog pages.
So what bloggers need to do is to get rid of the majority of useless nonsense-making icons. They will not have any large advantage of keeping them beneath every blog post. It is better to have no more than three social bookmark icons, because then all the bookmarks will be on the same websites instead of small numbers of bookmarks spread over different websites. The large amount of icons only causes confusion, extra loading time, noise and after a while even irritation. Just get your circus of the road and try to move on with a blog with qualitative content and few bookmark icons that are really needed and wanted.
References: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/93-its-the-content-not-the-icons http://www.velvetblues.com/web-development-blog/most-annoying-website-features/ http://chris.pirillo.com/social-bookmarking-button-madness/ http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/why-too-many-little-icons-can-easily-distract-your-visitors.html http://www.vanseodesign.com/social-media/how-many-social-media-icons-is-too-many/
