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.
Andrew Careaga 