How much blog bling is too much?
Context: I was just at A VC – a blog by Fred Wilson, a New York venture capitalist that I follow from time to time.
He has about 5 million widgets and doodads hanging off his blog. He’s even worse, if possible, than Matthew Ingram.
Let me count. In the left sidebar Fred’s got:
- A picture
- Feedblitz RSS subscription form
- Yahoo! search widget
- Assorted other Fred Wilson RSS feeds
- My Blog Community photo widget
- Gotham Gal’s Stuff
- Podcasts he listens to
- Amazon music widget with about 15 albums in it
- tourb.us concert widget
- Streampad My Music widget
- Last.fm music widget
- iTunes music widget
- Shopcasting widget from ThisNext with about 6 products and full descriptions
- Alacra store search widget
- Blog categories
- Blog archives
- Blog about
- Blog stats
- Various links: axis of evil
- Fred’s social networks
- Facebook widget
- LinkedIn widget
- Some other links
In the right sidebar, not to be outdone, he’s got:
- Sitepal voice message widget
- Personality profile link (what a shock, he’s not high on aesthetics)
- Federated Media (FM) publishing banner ad (skyscraper format)
- Flickr widget
- Wallstrip video widget
- Shakeshack widget
- More FM ads
- VC Feedburner network widget
- WordofBlog widget
- Ad for another of his blogs
- Del.icio.us linkroll widget with about 20 recent links, including brief descriptions
- Indeed.com job posting “jobroll” widget
- Another Indeed.com widget, this one focusing on salaries in NY
- Blogroll with about a hundred blogs in it
- Another shopcasting widget from ThisNext with about 10 products, pictures, and descriptions in it
- Recent searches widget
- Contextual text link ads from Yahoo!
- Contextual text link ads from Google (could be against AdSense terms & conditions if Yahoo! is also being used – I think it is, actually)
- Recent posts
As I said earlier: holy freaking mother. Stop the insanity!
That’s the cutest cat picture I’ve seen all day! It’s my new IM person-icon 🙂 Thanks JK!
[…] Widgets, you say? John Koetsier feels widgeted to death by Fred Wilson’s blog. Hey Fred: what, no tag cloud? […]
Really awesome cat dude. Is that one yours? Seriously, you aren’t kidding about this being WAY overdone. But I’m curious John…what say you to the multitude of icons at the end of posts? I say, if you’re going more than 1 line, you’re going OVER the line.
Glad to hear there’s someone worse than me 🙂
This is one of the funniest post ever. Thanks for adding humor to my day. (Is there a benefit from having all those widgets? I don’t get it, actually.)
This reminds me of the first newsletter I ever produced with my new Mac (I had the original 128k edition).
I think I used every font and type size along with lots of “bold” to make my newsletter really “pop”.
It was a nightmare for my readers!
Perhaps over time common sense will replace “blog insanity”. But for now I understand the temptation.
When you’ve got the world’s biggest box of crayons, you want to use them all!
Good post – thanks for stirring the blogosphere pot!
it’s an addiction
until someone does an intervention, i think i’ll just keep adding more!
Wonder if anyone’s ever done a virtual intervention. 😉
Will virtual intervention require a widget of some type? (i.e. a widget to remove the widgets?) And does one have to be an addict to join?
LOL