Lessons Learned in the Demise of Delicious

As the 'unofficial' news broke on Twitter and subsequently TechCrunch, social learners today discovered that Delicious might be going dark. Whether or not the story becomes mirrored in reality, there are a few lessons educators can take from the news.

Lesson #1 The Education Community is Resilient
Alec Couros has inspired the creation of Alternatives to Delicious, a Google Document that has been edited by at least 40 collaborators.


It will be a challenge to recreate the link-sharing network I've grown to love at Delicious, but whether it happens tomorrow; next year; or five years from now; there will one day be a need to relocate my links. In this case, it's a straightforward process to migrate bookmarks to Diigo, or another service.

Lesson #2 Free is Not Forever


We learned last spring, when Ning began to charge for what was formerly a free social network service, that it takes money, and real people to provide the services we often take for granted. In the case of Delicious, it now appears that the parent company, Yahoo, will be cutting the virtual service, in order to deal with financial realities.

Lesson #3 You Need a Backup Plan
It may not seem important when your digital life is firing on all cylinders, but users of cloud services (especially free services) should think about what they'll do if the unthinkable happens. Flickr is also managed by Yahoo; might it be jettisoned next? Could Twitter or Facebook one day be seen as financially unviable? Might Google decide one day, that Gmail or Google Docs makes more sense as a monthly subscription service?

Whatever you do in response to the possible demise of Delicious, it's always a good time to think about what you're doing to protect your ideas; your data; and your memories.

Diigo is more Filling than Delicious

Social bookmarking favourite Del.icio.us is finally getting strong competition from Diigo, as the edu-blogosphere turns its attention to the 'newer' kid on the block.

Never heard of Diigo?



Diigo is great for highlighting content on pages and for creating and sharing 'notes' on a given web page. For research, or collaborative information gathering and annotation, the highlight features are promising. The fact that you can search for notes recorded by others, and that you can share 'highlights' may take collaborative learning to a new level; but in reflecting on my 'hardcover' past, I've found that the one with the highlighter often brightens information that I'd rather skim past!

I suspect that librarians would be eager to share Diigo to students, if for no other reason than to teach the effective annotation of web resources. Educators looking to combat plagiarism might even call for students to share their web research by requiring the tagging, highlighting and annotating of sources with this tool. Advanced users will make use of the embedded 'webslide' tool, to include their research in automated slideshows.



It remains to be seen whether or not Diigo will make advances on the traction its gained of late, but this beta tool is so feature-rich that many educators are sure to become active 'diigers'. The fact that the site embeds a number of social networking tools (i.e., comment wall; friends' activities; groups...) will likely work against this tool's use within elementary and secondary schools, as filters work overtime to block such interactivity.

Will scholarly university students move to this space to avoid the distractions running amock in Facebook?

For links that you want to find and share easily, Delicious is the most accessible and efficient tool: bookmarking with tags takes only a moment, and the interface is uncomplicated. For higher-level thinking and public reflection about web content including the sharing of more complete meta-information - Diigo may well be the ticket!

The genesis of this topic is explained on today's Teacher 2.0 Podcast... 9 minutes of inspiration.