Bookmark buttons (in moderation) are a great blog feature

[Image: tagbar]37 signals started a bit of buzz today with Matt’s post railing on bookmarking icons, and SEOMoz followed up with a much better breakdown of the “the issue,” - but I think he lends too much credence to Matt’s complaint - I think it’s a pretty simple question of design, and not really an issue that has anything to do with content.

The little tagging buttons in question are the “Tag this in del.icio.us” icons (image right) that have popped up on blogs all over the place.

Matt seems to think (and I gather a lot of people agree) that this is a kind of trashy self-promotion mechanism. I think they’re useful buttons that need to be properly integrated into your site design.

How did I end up there? Well, if anyone comes across a post that they would like to post to Digg, for example, it’s easier for them to use a button placed conveniently.

So, with that in mind, it follows logically that if you like Digg and you want to simultaneously support it and make its use easier for visitors to your site, adding a “post to Digg” button would be a smart move. This is the reason these icons are showing up everywhere: they’re a good idea.

The problem is that blogs are like MySpace - most of them are not run by professional designers, so when people add things like bookmark buttons, they often end up hacked in to a pre-existing template in a sort of ugly fashion.

If they’re placed smartly and unobtrusively (for example, in my site, they don’t show up on the front page - only tactfully at the bottom of my permalink pages), they can be a great addition to a good blog. And once they’re there, they shouldn’t have any effect on the quality of the blog’s content, good or bad.

So I don’t think the problem is simply having the buttons all over so many blogs, I think the problem is that they’ve been poorly integrated (from a design standpoint) so far.