Deep Jive Interests

In a recent post in the 37Signal’s blog “signal vs. noise”, Matt rants on about how those little icons at the bottom of everyone’s posts (like this blog’s) are polluting the good design of the web.

So think twice before badgering readers with “vote for me” pleas. The hectoring is tiresome, it results in extraneous visual noise, it makes your site look cheap, and the benefits are dubious at best. Instead, focus on delivering great content. If you do, people will figure out how to spread the word just fine.

All right, I’ll grant you that he does make a point: quality matters.

But to say that having these icons is the equivalent of “badgering” or perhaps “aggressive social network link beggaring” is completely uncalled for.  He makes the point that the top 10 (or 20 or whatever) Technorati blogs have no such link begging going on — but then again, they didn’t live in, or grow up in the climate that most blogs do today.

In fact, I’d say shame on Matt for being completely out of touch with what its like trying to grow a blog these days.  Great content, of course, matters.  But sometimes its not enough.

I would argue that there are probably far too many blogs with not enough exposure, even.

Why begrudge a blogger for getting as much pub as he or she can?  Its not unethical and its not directly harming any one any way.  Moreover, MFA (made for adsense) and content-poor sites will die a slow death eventually.