Marketing guru Seth Godin blogged today about adding some fancy new links on his site.

First, he added this little pop up thing next to his books. It’s not a true pop up window (it’s all web 2.0–what is that? Java? Ruby on Rails?) but it gives you a number of link options. You can buy the book on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Google it or do half a dozen other things. It’s interesting. Some what useful. I can’t help but wonder if one more arrow next to his book will confuse people (do I click on the book, the arrow, or the title?). It’s also fairly similar to SnapShots, which I also find some what confusing/distracting.

But second, Godin also added “flair” to the bottom of each post for Technorati, Digg and del.icio.us saving/linking/adding/whatever-you-do-there. I’m so unsure about this sort of feature-creep. I talked about it before, getting some inspiration from Jason Kottke to tone down the excessive information.

I can see the advantage of adding these sorts of tools. You want people to Digg your articles. You want people to save your entry so they can read it later. But how many of these tools can you pander to? (seems like somewhere I’ve seen an example where somebody just added as many of these icons and buttons as possible, to hilarious results) Just the popular ones? Do you swap out popular ones with even more popular ones every few months? And how distracting is that?

I think if someone is going to use a service like Digg or del.icio.us then they don’t need you reminding them to do it. They have the plugins or the shortcuts or whatever they need to do to tag or save or ding your blog entry and they’ll do it their own way without your fancy little buttons. That’s my opinion anyway, but it doesn’t seem to stop anyone from adding all those tools, whether it’s a blogger like Seth Godin or a major newspaper.