I’m quite keen to add bookmarks to my blog, so that people can use their favourite social bookmarking site but would prefer not to have lots of small icons all over the place. Any ideas?

This question actually came up at work while we were doing some brainstorming about http://gov.im, and was actually answered for me by Sherrilynne from StrivePR without her even realising. It’s become quite popular for websites to add links to their favourite social bookmarking sites, but it is really wasteful on resources to have the same links and images on all the pages of your website when move people who use these networks really have a toolbar installed.

The answer comes in the form of a website called AddThis. The website lets you add a simple image shown here:

to each page which is just a short cut to a screen that lets you select the networks you would like to bookmark your page to. The great thing is that once you’ve used it, it can remember what your bookmarking service you like, so that the next time you bookmark something it will take you straight to your favourite social bookmarking engine. It wipes out the need for the multitude of little icons that seem to be inundating most blogs and websites nowadays.Oh .. and you can get it as a plugin for most blog engines too. Check it out.