Gah! Too…Many…Icons!

We’ve developed something of a “try it and see what works” attitude toward our blogs, evident on the surface by several new blogs we’ve launched recently as well as some back-end tools that users can’t see but that make our lives easier. But today we added some very visible improvements to blogs.cio.com.

Scroll to the bottom of any blog entry and you’ll see an assortment of colorful–confusing, some might say–icons.  What they mean in the abstract is that we’re trying to play a bit more seriously in the land of the “long tail.” What the icons actually do is provide you with a variety of ways to organize and share our blog entries.

Ignore them as so much Web 2.0 link begging if you want, but if you’d like to see what they’re all about, read on:

del.icio.us: Sort and share your favorite links, then search for content submitted by other del.icio.us users.

Digg: User-submitted, edited and moderated technology news service. Add your own stories and rate the value of pieces submitted by other readers.

Reddit: Submit and vote on stories, then receive personalized lists of pieces Reddit thinks you’ll like.

Ma.gnolia: Save your favorite sites as bookmarks and tag them with your own search terms for easy recall, sorting and sharing.

Newsvine: Read, write and discuss hot news stories.

Furl: Rather than just saving bookmarks to pages, Furl lets you save the entire page in a personal storage area for later retrieval and sharing. Even if the page changes, your Furled copy stays the same.

We hope you find the tools useful. If you run into any problems, leave a comment here or email me at clindquist@cxo.com.