AndyA - 5:33 pm on May 7, 2012 (gmt 0)

@shallow: I'm in the early stages of a site redesign, and where to add the social buttons was something I considered as well. My thoughts were a person couldn't know if they wanted to share an article until after they'd read it. So, it wouldn't make sense to put them before the article, as they'd have to scroll back up to get to them. Putting them at top and bottom I thought was overkill, so I opted to place them at the bottom after the article or page content, as that seemed more convenient for the user.

Not sure if this will be of any help to you, but that was my thought process.