Just a few days ago I posted about Yahoo! News's odd practice of not including a link to bookmark articles on del.icio.us, especially odd given that the company owns del.icio.us. To make my point, I used the New York Times website as an example of one of the many media websites that includes "Share" links to del.icio.us and other social bookmarking tools with each and every article. I even included a screenshot from NYTimes.com to illustrate my point.

Well, earlier tonight the Times has made some changes, and del.icio.us is no longer featured as one of the site's bookmarking links. It and Newsvine have been removed in favor of two newcomers to the game, Mixx and Yahoo! Buzz. Mixx, which has only been around for about 6 months, is a social news and multimedia site developed by a former exec at Yahoo! News and USA Today. It's sort of a cross between Digg and Newsvine, where users vote on content found around the web with higher rated content placed higher on the site. Yahoo! Buzz is a similar tool that debuted just a few weeks ago.

With this focus on social voting/ratings (the Digg model) in its "Share" links, the Times appears to be giving a quiet endorsement to that model over simple bookmarking (the del.icio.us model). There is, however, another possibility. Given that Yahoo! owns both del.icio.us and Buzz, its possible that the company simply asked the Times to switch which of its sites the news outlet linked to. Yahoo! clearly is giving Buzz a much bigger push than it has given del.icio.us, illustrated most clearly by the inclusion of Buzz, not del.icio.us, links within Yahoo! News.

What do you think? Is the NY Times betting on the future of the social web, or simply honoring a corporate request?

In the last couple of years, bookmarking and sharing links have become commonplace on news media websites. Read any article on just about any news site, and you'll have the option to bookmark the story on del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Newsvine or several other services. This is becoming as true on a small city newspaper site as it is on a giant like the New York Times.

For those of us who use such services, this is a huge convenience. In fact, that "Recent Reads" block over in the right-hand column of this website is partially powered by my del.icio.us account, with many of the articles in that list added via the kind of bookmark link I'm writing about.

For better or worse, my #1 source of news is still Yahoo! News. Using their RSS feeds, I keep up to date with top stories from the AP, Reuters and others all from one source. Sadly, however, Yahoo! News is one of the few big name news websites that doesn't offer its readers bookmarking links. Sure, they have a link to vote for an article on the company's new Digg competitor, Yahoo! Buzz, but there are zero bookmarking options. What makes this omission all the more notable is the fact that Yahoo! owns del.icio.us. Yes, that's right. Yahoo! owns one of the web's biggest social bookmarking services, a service that is linked to by nearly every major media outlet in America, yet the company doesn't even link to it from within its own site.

Note that, for your convenience, I've included a link for you to bookmark this post on del.icio.us. And I don't even own the company.