You ask: "So why promote delicious bookmarking at all!?"

Well, it seems to me that you should spend more time asking yourself how to serve your visitors rather than how to serve yourself.

The reason so much of the internet sucks is because publishers spend too much time trying to get people on their site by doing SEO and all that crap, then they crowd up the best parts of their website with obtrusive ads (a bit like the ad bar right above your articles).

Instead of all that, just focus on creating good content. I'm not trying to be mean, that just makes a better internet for all of us.

On my blog I explore everything that has to do with designing, developing, and marketing websites. Internet marketing is an important part of an effective website.

Regarding your implication that I don't address the user's needs, one of my blog's primary topics is user experience design. Under that you'll find such posts as "Online community best practices: Reward your top users," "Web form usability: Better form submission feedback with jQuery," and "3 eye tracking studies that influenced my latest redesign." So to imply that I'm not concerned about what my users want or creating good content, you've been mislead.

Good content is important. And so is finding audiences for that good content. You need both. Good content and good traffic.

Good traffic is not the same as exploiting sources of traffic. That's actually called spamming.

There's a lot of code in delicious (or at least there was) to prevent that sort of gaming.

Would you say that every blog that promotes delicious bookmarking is spamming? That's what I see you implying. If so, you are implicating nearly every popular blog that exists today.

The main reason to save things to delicious is for memory. Sharing is secondary. And getting on the front page or popular were a distant third.

So stuff that goes beyond "please bookmark us" - that's what those buttons do - seems dangerous to me. Especially since actual users have the extension or bookmarklets installed and do not need the site buttons.

I'd seen an enormous amount of shady behavior in and around this so perhaps I am oversensitive. At one point I was spending half my day, every day, dealing with spam on delicious.

"The main reason to save things to delicious is for memory. Sharing is secondary. And getting on the front page or popular were a distant third."

I think the first and second reasons apply to bookmarkers, and the third applies to publishers. For publishers, the primary reason is the front page IMHO.

"So stuff that goes beyond "please bookmark us" - that's what those buttons do - seems dangerous to me. Especially since actual users have the extension or bookmarklets installed and do not need the site buttons."

I can understand this sensitivity. If you look on my blog, I have a simple link that says "bookmark everywhere." But my popular delicious content is no longer rewarded with a front page link.

"I'd seen an enormous amount of shady behavior in and around this so perhaps I am oversensitive. At one point I was spending half my day, every day, dealing with spam on delicious."

Spam sucks hardcore ass. What else can I say?

I don't see how you can seriously argue this. You have 10 submissions to Hacker News, and all 10 of them are to your own website.

Argue what? I'm not denying that I use social media as part of my inbound marketing strategy. But I engage with the people that comment. Besides, I spend my time writing what I feel are important blog entries. I'd say I do my part for the community I'm a part of.

Getting people to promote something beyond what they would do on their own is, IMO, problematic.

I agree that the front page is useless. But it always was, now it's just bizarrely Twitter-oriented uselessness.