I’ve chimed in on my take on the whole Social Networking linking issue here previously but I wanted to update things a bit. My major issue with the whole thing of asking visitors to submit links to your stuff was mostly based around the initial situation where 5 gazillion buttons were being added to people’s sites and cluttered up the look of things. It was pretty nasty and in many cases looked like there were more buttons appearing than actual text in the post entries they were attached to. This really turned me off. (in much the same way as a site that is literally crammed with Google ads and other flashing/floating ads)

However, with the usage of the Share This plugin, I’m no longer quite as upset by the whole thing–since the buttons are hidden unless a user wishes to actually access them. I’ve added in the classic version of the plugin to this site and will test out how it goes. I’d love to hear people’s comments on what they think about this whole trend toward adding social linking buttons to blogs–do you think it’s a natural addition and helps the site or do you think it’s an unnecessary and bad idea and makes things look cheap?