I’ve already written today about the Seattle Times and their efforts to enhance the comment system on their articles, so it seems only fair that I talk about a recent addition to the Seattle PI: a cryptic little bookmarking tool named “ShareSave.”
These little pop-up links are now appearing at the bottom of P-I blog posts and they allow the reader to tag the post on a number of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg, and newsvine.
It’s a good idea, and I’m glad that the P-I is encouraging users to bookmark their blog posts on other services. It shows an understanding of how linking and aggregators work, and it also shows that they’re thinking about user behavior at the bottom of a post, and they’re encouraging the behavior they’d like to see.
At the bottom of every post on this blog, I have two links: one to subscribe to my RSS feed, and another to e-mail the post to a friend. I keep it simple because right I’m focusing on two things: growing the community around this blog, and helping the people in this community talk with each other.
By reducing the number of options, I hope to be suggesting a certain type of behavior: become a member of this community, or, share this community with a friend.
In the case of the P-I, I’d suggest the following:
- Change the link from a pop-up to some sort of DHTML or AJAX function that expands within the page instead of rolling over page elements.
- Find a more explanatory way to label the link
Regardless it’s good to see both of my local papers innovating with their online product. If you keep throwing spaghetti something will eventually stick.
Eat Sleep Publish is a Seattle-based blog that explores the difficulties and opportunities currently facing the publishing industry. 
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