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!