So, new buzzword. Iconistan is a cute coinage, attributed by Wired News to Tony Conrad of Sphere in this post, who attributes the coinage in turn to Kourosh Karimkhany of Conde Naste — which shows how carefully Wired News read the article, I suppose — Wired News anticipates a turf war of some kind over the nest of little icons you may have noticed across the bottom of blog posts here and there.
Well, not here, strictly speaking: I did have a little experiment with these icons a while back, but they ruined the look of the page, so they were gone again before most of you even saw them. Apart from cluttering up the page, it all seemed a bit redundant; a blog reader — as you presumably are — will use one or other (or more, but probably just one) of the social bookmarking applications, and if you do, and you have any sense — as you presumably do — you will have your own workflow established to incorporate your findings into your del.icio.us / Digg / Reddit / whatever account. You may, for example, have a toolbar button in your browser that does the job. In any case, you don’t need a button in the page, and if you don’t use any of these applications, the buttons are just advertising. And you know what we think of advertising round here, don’t you?
Pollution.
UPDATE (following day) Matt Haughey links to a post that Jason Kottke made three years ago that addresses this issue with considerable panache.
