Battle Brewing Over 'Iconistan'

by snuffysmith | December 12, 2006 at 09:38 am

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Go to the bottom of many social bookmarking sites and you'll see a minefield of tiny icons - Del.icio.us, Technorati, Digg, NowPublic, etc.

Altogether, these are being called "Iconistan" and according to Wired Mag today, it's the focus of intense conflict. Read this:

There's a turf war heating up over a strip of web real estate called "Iconistan."

You won't find this mythical land on a map, as Iconistan exists only at the bottom of blog posts. It's where that little crowd of icons gathers, begging you to post a bit of news to Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us and various other social news and community sites.

"Those submit buttons present independent publishers with an excellent opportunity to leverage the growing audience for social news sites," says Tony Conrad, CEO and co-founder of Sphere, who coined the term "Iconistan" in a recent blog post.

Social news sites like Digg, Reddit and Newsvine encourage their readers to submit news stories they find online, and the developers of those sites have created these tiny widgets to facilitate the submission process.