How to Prepare for the Delicious Shut Down

Update: in a blog post this afternoon Yahoo says they might not shut down Delicious. I read it, it doesn't look promising. Check it out. 

The tech and education blog-o-spheres are humming with the news that Yahoo is probably going to shut down the popular social bookmarking service Delicious (Read Write Web has two good stories about it here and here). In an effort to help you prepare for the closure of Delicious, I created this short post.

Before looking at alternatives to Delicious, let's get your bookmarks out of Delicious so that you can use them somewhere else.

Step 1: Log into your Delicious account and click on "settings." (Settings should appear in the upper right corner of your screen). 

Step 2: Select "export/ backup bookmarks."

Step 3: Choose whether or not you want to export the notes and tags you've assigned to your bookmarks. Depending on which application you plan to use your bookmarks in in the future, trying to import tags and notes might cause some glitches. To play it safe I exported my bookmarks twice, once with tags and notes, once without tags and notes.

Step 4: Save the HTML to your local computer. Once you have the file you can import it into any browser and into most social bookmarking services.

Alternatives to Delicious

If your school is a Google Apps for Education school, the first alternative to Delicious that I would consider is Google Bookmarks. In Google Bookmarks you can create lists that you can share publicly or keep private. One of the nice things about the list feature is that you can choose to make some of your lists public while keeping others private. Just like with Google Docs, you can invite other people to share and add to your work. Lists in Google Bookmarks aren't limited to simple text links. You can add maps, images, and videos to your lists in Google Bookmarks. Additionally, any of your Google Docs files can be added to your lists in Google Bookmarks. Google Bookmarks can be added to your existing Google account so you don't have remember a new user name or password to take advantage of the service.


If you do end up going with Google Bookmarks, I'd recommend also looking at Yawas. Yawas is a free web annotation tool for Firefox and Chrome built on top of Google Bookmarks. Yawas enables you to highlight text on any webpage and save it in your Google Bookmarks account. Once Yawas is installed just highlight the text on a page, right click, and send it to your Google Bookmarks account.
 
Diigo has been popular with educators for quite a while. Some of its features moved behind a paywall earlier this year, but it's still a good service to consider as a replacement for Delicious. Last fall,  Jose Picardo (I highly recommend his blog) posted a quick guide to annotating using Diigo. He created the video for his students and if you're considering using Diigo with your students it could be very useful for you too. The video is embedded below.

A Guide to Annotating using Diigo from José Picardo on Vimeo.

Memonic is a tool for curating collections of information from the web. Memonic's key function is to give users the power to clip sections of websites and build them into a personal collection. Along with the clipping of information, users can add commentary to each item they place into their personal accounts. For example, if I clipped a paragraph from iLearnTechnology I could also add some notes for myself about that paragraph. There are a couple of ways to add content to the folders within a Memonic account. The easiest way to add content to a Memonic account is to use the Memonic bookmarklet for Firefox. After the bookmarklet is installed, users can click it at anytime while they're browsing the web to add content to their Memonic folders. Alternatively, users can add content by typing the url of a desired page into the Memonic "web clipper" that is present within every Memonic user's account page. Watch a holiday-themed introduction to Memonic below.


What are your suggestions for alternatives to Delicious?