Valhalla Island

This is a post at The Uber Geeks which really has quite a nice homepage but the single post pages are covered in so much crap it’s difficult to find the post content. To help everyone out I’ve highlighted the actual post content in green, the rest is advertising, meta information and advertising disguised as meta information.

The sentence asking me to digg the post is almost as long as the article itself. If I liked the sentence-long post enough to digg it, it’d be half as much a digg for the sentence telling me to digg it. Which brings me to my next point…

Digg means “like”. For example, I like your new design / I dig your new design. To digg something is to publically announce you like it for the purpose of making it known to others that may also like/dig it and therefore also digg it. When a post ends with the sentence “Did you like this post? Consider digging it”, I read it as “Did you like this post? Consider liking it publically”.

To extend on the post by 37 Signals about stupid amounts of social bookmarking links on blog posts. I see it as arrogant, especially in this situation. You insert something in your theme, whether it be via a plugin or hard coding, that attaches a prompt for readers to add every post to every social bookmarking site, presuming every post you write is worthy of being bookmarked and submitted to sites full of the latest news and best articles on the internet.

Some posts on The Uber Geeks certainly are digg submit or bookmark worthy and in that case I will digg them or bookmark them. I’m not just picking on The Uber Geeks here, this post was just a good example, there’s many sites much worse.

Is it really worth the visual clutter added to your site, added to every post? Is it worth coming across as someone who believes everything you write is worthy of digg submission and bookmarking?

I liken this trend to the use of target=”_blank”. It’s assuming and forcing something on me that I will do myself if I want to.