Today’s news that Yahoo is shutting down the social bookmarking site Delicious puts our department in a quandary. Since 2008, we’ve been using Delicious as an online clipping service of sorts. I wrote about this in April 2008, thinking we were mighty clever to employ this as a means to track media coverage. Our approach was even written up and lauded in a book about social media metrics.
But now, Delicious is headed for the trash heap. Whether you use the service for work or for personal sharing and bookmarking, this means you’ve got to make a change.
Fortunately, Mozilla developer Christian Heilman shared a tip for pulling your Delicious bookmarks into a spreadsheet. Here’s what he posted on TechCrunch:
You can do a CURL on the command line: https://{your username}:{your password}@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all > bookmarks.xml to get the bookmarks as bookmarks.xml – then you can put them in a spreadsheet.
We haven’t had a chance to try this yet but we will, and will post whether or not we succeeded.
And then we’ll have to figure out what to do with our online clips. Ideas are welcomed.
Andy writes! 
I switched from Delicious to Google Reader a many months ago and have never looked back. I love that I can quickly tag and track posts from RSS feeds I subscribe to, but also use the “Note in Reader” bookmarklet to trap interesting things I find on the web.
Here’s the post I wrote about transitioning from Delicious to Google Reader.
I didn’t port all my bookmarks from Delicious over to Google, but it looks like CURL or something similar might make that process a little easier (though still time-consuming).
@amymengel
I love Google Reader, and also use Evernote to retain clips of all kind–it can store video and audio, and “clipping” web pages or portions of web pages is easy to do. Lots of backup options, a good mobile app, and best of all, everything is searchable–even text that appears in photos.
Thanks, Amy. Your approach seems to make sense. I’m a fan of Google Reader for personal use and will discuss your approach with our staff who manage the online clip book via Delicious.
I am more concerned about importing stuff from Delicious, but a lot of those news clips already bookmarked there expire eventually.
Denise – Thanks for the advice on Evernote, too.
Hey, I got the idea to use Delicious from you :) I only recently started using it, though. You may want to look into Diigo.
I coupled Delicious with a service called retaste.me to send a weekly list of clips to people in my office. It was great, because all I had to do was bookmark with Delicious and that was it. I’m looking for an alternative to that, so if anyone has any ideas, I’m all ears.