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?