Many of us mourned the departure of Google Wonder Wheel. It did so much to scaffold student thinking as they were trying to think of how to narrow down broad topics (World War II in a five-page report, anyone)?

Mariah, one of my intrepid students, found that there remains a Google Wonder Wheel alternative. Strangely enough, it runs through Google Ad Words. Take a look. Could be a decent stand-in for your students.

Mariah let the class know about this by posting to our class Diigo group. I am loving how students are sharing their class-related findings with one another. I get alerted to new sources I didn’t know about, too!

The Internet is hopping with doom-and-gloom statements that Delicious is no more and that Yahoo is sunsetting it, as well as several other tools. TechCrunch, Twitter, blogs … everybody’s saying it, so it must be true, right?

Well, maybe.

But for all the tech sites saying this is the case (and there are A LOT, though the Grey Lady is hedging her bets, as shown above), let’s backtrack a bit. Every news story or Tweet or blog post about the shutdown of Delicious is based on a single Tweet with what is supposedly a smuggled photo of a single PowerPoint slide. The Tweeter who “broke” the story is a former Yahoo employee who was not in the room at the time of the alleged announcement. (Not quite as official-sounding as, say, Colonel Mustard in the library with a candlestick.)

We have no word from Yahoo yet about the veracity of the rumor. Isn’t it weird that there’s nothing on the Delicious page (except several folks bookmarking sites saying that Delicious is shutting down), the Yahoo blog, or the Yahoo home page? {Update: about an hour after my blog post was originally posted, the Delicious blog gave an update.}

So although there are thousands of stories circulating declaring Delicious dead, as librarians, it’s a good time for us to reflect on the issues of accuracy, triangulation of data, primary versus secondary sources, and fact versus rumor.

Now I’m not saying the rumor *isn’t* true. (Though, for the record, Mikey from Life Cereal really didn’t die from Pop Rocks, no matter what my elementary school classmates said.) I’m just saying that we want to be careful about jumping to conclusions. Many voices saying the same thing doesn’t guarantee accuracy. Sometimes it just guarantees volume.

That being said, I have no doubt that Yahoo executives are holed up in an executive conference room right now wondering if, even if they *were* planning to close Delicious, they might be reconsidering given the backlash. After all, when’s the last time you drank a New Coke? :)

PS – It’s not a bad idea to move your bookmarks from Delicious to Diigo regardless of the veracity of the error. For one thing, you can configure your account so anything saved in Diigo auto-saves into your Delicious account, so there’s really no risk (unless the rumor proves true). For another, Diigo lets you share bookmarks with groups you set up, which is really cool for departments. Diigo can walk you through it. I moved to Diigo last winter after a student demoed it for me, set up the auto-feed to Delicious in case I decided to go back, and haven’t opened Delicious since.

Added 12/18: My former student teacher Michelle gave me the heads up that Diigo has an iPhone app … makes a swell tool even better!

Just stumbled upon a blog post that quotes my SLMAM article on social bookmarking from a few years ago. Take a look.