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!

Our preservice teachers in the UM School of Education’s Teaching with Technology course are required to lead a 20-minute Webinar on the pedagogical uses of a Web 2.0 tool and to create an accompanying how-to screencast to go along with it. This project wasn’t my idea, but I love how it forces the preservice teachers into separating the WHY from the HOW.

One of the tools that our students Farrah, Jen, and Eleni dug up was Twiddla. Here’s Farrah narrating a screencast of this rather amazing Thneed of a tool. You won’t believe everything that it can do for you … for free! And it has Etherpad intergration … and Etherpad is one of my favorite easy wiki-like collaborative authoring tools.

The team even points out that an educator account gives you freemium features for free.

I’m embedding it here, but it looks even better full-screen, so you can click through if you prefer.

My mom, when I was a kid, used to quote those Lucky Dog dog food ads that said, “I’m a lucky dog.” When I see outstanding work like this from students who are headed into K-12 classrooms, I’m a lucky dog indeed. And so are their future students. Check it out!

PS - It takes a lot of guts to let your professor post your work to a larger audience. So if you have feedback for them, they’d love to hear it! Thanks!

photo © 2009 Kat Martin | more info (via: Wylio)

I have a feeling I’m not the only librarian out there who worries that her students aren’t using Creative Commons images in their online work. I’ve seen violations from first grade up to graduate school, even among librarians and library students.

As I’ve mentioned before, Web browsers don’t help much, because when you capture an image from a Web page, the citation doesn’t travel with it.

I know, I know, everybody’s breaking copyright and posting whatever they want wherever they want, but still — it’s nice to do the right thing, isn’t it? (Isn’t it?????)

For some time, I’ve been using and recommending flickrcc.bluemountains.net as a source of high-quality, worry-free Creative Commons images. But even with that source, you’ve got to download and resize an image. Not horrible, but … now there’s something even easier. Wylio lets you do a search among Creative Commons-licensed items, see a preview of the image relative to your text, choose the alignment, and voila — you get an embed code that you can stick right into your blog or Web page, including a citation caption.

Wylio’s a great way to find images easily, use them ethically, and cite them effortlessly. Win-win for everyone.

Take a look at this video (from the Profhacker blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education, quickly becoming one of my favorite blogs for common sense advice on Web tools for teaching and learning) to learn more.

PS - Does anybody find it ironic that when I typed “University of Michigan” into the Wylio search, many of the photos on the original page were of wooden card catalog drawers???? So I used “North Quad,” our department’s new home, as the search term instead and got this pic of our building under construction. However, please don’t ask me how to get from my office to the top floor of that tower. As my office neighbor is fond of saying, this place is built a bit like Hogwarts. I told him that was fine as long as I didn’t need to be in Hufflepuff.