Why We Need Social Bookmarking and What To Do in the Wake of Delicious' Demise

Image via CrunchBaseDelicious was a really cool tool. Honestly, it was pre-yahoo. After yahoo bought them a scrappy little group of innovators headed by Maggie Tsai created Diigo. When they hand wrote a classroom console that let us take kids in under 13 and gave us more privacy features than we could imagine because of a request at ISTE -- I was hooked.

Delicious is dead
Now, Delicious is officially dying Delicious's future is up in the air as yahoo pulls the plug for good. looks to sell the venture. (update 12/17/2010 - Techcrunch says that Delicious needs to be "unloaded" not closed.) The good news is that you can go into Diigo and import your delicious bookmarks. You can also have it save to delicious (for as long as it exists.) under settings as well.

So, when you log into Diigo, go into your settings and there is a place to import from delicious. While you are at it, join our educators group for some wonderful resources.

Twitter is full of discussions with many commenting how they never use social bookmarking. Let me tell you how I use it.

My Top 5 Uses for Social Bookmarking

1. To send bookmarks to the classes and projects I work with.
   
   By using "standard" tags we can scrape the RSS and pull the best bookmarks by topic to feed to our students and my students as they research. I learned this from Alan Levine with their Horizon Project but it is so useful.
   
    
2. To send you links on this blog
   
   Everything I tag "education" goes into my daily spotlight. I'm sending to students AND blogging at the same time!
   
3. To create a self-vetted searchable database
   
   When I'm writing my book I sometimes search the web but I start with searching my own bookmarks. If I've bookmarked and written my comments then it is self-vetted even if the dusty neuron that it was implanted upon has long disintegrated it is there in my bookmarks! You might wonder who you can trust on the Internet - if you cannot trust yourself who can you trust!
   
4. To create lists to share.
   
   On diigo, I can make lists and convert them to webslides that people can embed and I can put on presentations. Webslides are some of the coolest tools on Diigo.
   
5. To share with Groups of People
   
   The educators group is hugely useful way to share

These may be different from how many people use bookmarking, but then again, Diigo is a very different bookmarking tool. Maybe they are what Delicious would have been if they had stayed owned by a small group of people.

Anyway -- although the Gawker incident may have caused me pain, this one doesn't.  Goodbye delicious, I barely knew ye.