Images on Kinja

Like everybody else I know on the internet I have been having a poke around with Kinja. I don't have much of an opinion on the throwing-kinja-shapes-social-networking-share-a-thon thing that seems to have got others excited, but I am interested in the way they are handling the icons for each blog / site / feed after reading their FAQ page.

To make scanning easier on the eye, Kinja runs an icon -- a small picture byline -- by each item. As a starting point, we've manually created icons for many sites.

If a site doesn't have a icon that the Kinja team have pre-defined, it has a blank 32x32 square as the icon. This doesn't actually perform the function of breaking the text up very well - perhaps if they changed the colour of their nothing.gif to be a block of colour it would aid scanning further.

There are also instructions for sending a 32x32 graphic to Kinja as the icon for your own site, which they will then upload. That seems to be making an awful lot of work for themselves, and not terribly scalable. Wouldn't they be better off defining where you should put a 32x32 pixel gif with a specified filename on your own site that they could pull in like a favicon? Or maybe they should just pull in favicons?