Otis, my apologies. That would be pretty conflicting for you ;)
I’ve made the changes in the post. Sorry for the confusion!

I agree, any way that you can help your readers out, it’s definitely a positive. However, I think that 37Signals argument is that you sacrifice your design by adding these buttons, especially for the low number of people who actually use them. I personally agree with 37Signals that it can detract quite a bit from the site if you have a gazillion little buttons running across the bottom of your post. I’ve used them on other blogs once or twice, and in the time it took me to find the site I wanted to bookmark to I could have already added it at Del.icio.us.

However, I think Tamar has the right idea. There’s probably a happy medium in reducing the total number of buttons to just a few. It just depends on your own site, whether you think it’s a big benefit to the people who use it.

Something to take away from this is the fact that we should always be listening to other ideas, especially from people more qualified. Take 37Signals: They have some of the most popular web apps and are pretty much the poster children of “web 2.0″. Their blog RSS subscription number alone is 40X LifeDev. I figure they gotta be doing something right.
;)

You put this an interesting way — that the bookmark pages “aren’t focusing on what’s really important: the content.” But if you have good content, those bookmarking buttons at the *bottom* of the page should not deemphasize the quality of your post.

I’ve actually reduced the number of bookmarking icons on my site since that article (I was trigger-happy for awhile for experimental sake despite its unattractiveness), but I don’t think that removing the icons completely really would have a negative effect on my site.