Four stages of adding AddThis to this WordPress.com blog: (1) attempt; (2) hey, it seems to work; (3) no, it doesn’t; (4) providing bonus links; (5) returning a few weeks later and adding AddThis to the sidebar.
(1) Original post was as follows. Right now, I’m just trying to see if WordPress.com will allow use of an AddThis blog button… will edit this post later.
(2) Here’s the later, rather optimistic edit.
You’d like people to bookmark your stuff, especially if they use a social bookmarking service. So you’d like to put a button (or other link) on your blog (or other site) to make it easy for visitors to bookmark you. The trouble is, there are so many social bookmarking services that you don’t want to include a button for each of them.
So you’d like one button to rule them all. AddThis provides such a button. Actually it provides several, the smallest of which appears in this post. Now, down to business, via TechCrunch.
AddThis is gathering some very interesting data that can form the core of a business model now that they have fairly deep penetration. They’re releasing some of this data… AddThis also sees what stories people are bookmarking.
I’m considering putting the AddThis button on the sidebar of this blog. That’s saying something, given my current minimalist tastes.
There is an AddThis blog. The current post tells us that AddThis is now serving over 2 million buttons each day. The blog uses WordPress. I hope that this will encourage AddThis to continue to produce widgets that don’t use JavaScript. (Such widgets aren’t allowed on WordPress.com, although they are allowed on WordPress blogs hosted elsewhere.)
(3) On later checking, the link from the button doesn’t work. A new window comes up, and allows me to choose a bookmarking site. But when I select a site, and get to it, the URL of the blog page isn’t there. So, apparently WordPress.com does strip out some of the AddThis code.
(4) There’s a thread on AddThis on the WordPress.com support forum.
(5) It now (a few weeks later) seems to work, so I’m putting the button in the sidebar.