Thursday, November 02, 2006

Digging Social Snobbery Signals

Problogger picked up on a post over at 37Signals about social bookmarking icons on blog posts. The argument is that they probably don't really work and they make your site look cheap/ugly. They've cited the digg and technorati top 10 lists to show that the most popular sites don't use them. The theory is that if you concentrate on producing the content then you'll get there. Fine. Makes sense. Or it does if your audience is the sort who peruse Digg because they're most likely a fairly tech-savvy crowd. But, as Peter Ottery pointed out in the comments at the 37Signals post, not everyone knows about social bookmarking and if your audience is less tech oriented then, as well as encouraging them to promote your site, you're offering them something new. Design issues aside, and nobody is shying away from the design issues, most of the arguments against reek of that old web geek snobbery i.e. anyone who doesn't know already is too dumb to work it out. The first I knew of delicious was from a 'post to delicious' link on a blog post. That's how the web works, as it happens. None of it is ever going to be black-and-white, no matter how many marketing gurus or tech experts tell you so. What'll work for some, will fail for others. If you're a funeral home you don't put up a big Santa Claus themed window display to attract customers but that doesn't mean it's a bad idea for the greeting card shop down the road. BTW 37Signals make some great web-based software. Their collabrative writing tool, Writeboard, was a Godsend for us.