I’m cc’ing this by email to my Posterous blog, so you can read this and some of the other issues we’ve tackled on the TESOL Arabia Ed Tech SIG list at http://justcurious.posterous.com.  (When emailing this, the subject of my email becomes the title of the blog posts; any images or media I attached would be embedded in the post; quite nice and easy to use with students).

The question of the day is: “Diigo is now the one to link with Google and delicious needs a yahoo ID - is it best to stick to one or use both?”

More good questions!  Whether to use Delicious or Diigo is a personal choice; however most bloggers seem convinced that Delicious has the greater user base.  In a blog post, Christy Tucker, asks which is best for beginners, Diigo or Delicious?  She seems torn between the basic functionality of Delicious (no confusing extra features) or the greater visual appeal of Diigo (plus having all those extra features!):

http://christytucker.wordpress.com/2008/03/29/diigo-or-delicious-for-beginners/

When I Googled to try and find up to date statistics on , the info I kept turning up was years out of date, so I plugged +2010 in the search query.  This was the one post I found from earlier this year:

http://primarytech.globalteacher.org.au/2010/01/09/social-bookmarking-delicious-vs-diigo/

This is from Kathleen McGeady, a teacher who was using Delicious and switched to Diigo due to the 7 additional features she mentions in her post.  She also notes that “If you are using Delicious and want to make the switch, you can import all your Delicious bookmarks to Diigo and you can activate the Diigo setting to “Save to Delicious”. This means you can send your new Diigo bookmarks to Delicious automatically.”

Doug Noon reports that he did this but it didn’t all go smoothly:

http://borderland.northernattitude.org/2008/03/29/migrating-delicious-to-diigo/

However, Maggie Tsai, one of Diigo’s developers and spokespersons, was quick to comment, and in her second comment she explains in some detail how to do this.  In the last comment here, Doug still didn’t seem sold on Diigo.

Marshall Kirkpatrick posted at TechCrunch that he thinks Diigo “rocks”:

http://techcrunch.com/2006/08/02/diigo-is-a-research-tool-that-rocks/

Marshall write that 4 years ago. Since then, I personally have become very intrigued with Diigo and have been poised for some time to do what Kathleen McGeady did (but have hesitated being aware of experiences like those of Doug Noon). 

Ideally, because of the larger network, you should use, or at least experiment with both.  If you choose one, I’d go with Delicious (larger network, the defacto social bookmark site for many).  If I wanted to use Diigo I would synch my Delicious bookmarks there and set Diigo to post back to Delicious (I’m still not clear is posting to Delicious updates Diigo; I doubt it does, and I guess this is why I haven’t made the move myself).

I have been very happy with Delicious as a means of keeping track of my own browsing on the web and being able to pull up links at will and share them with others quickly and effectively.  However, if I wanted to annotate sites and show those with my annotations to others, or if I wanted to make slide shows of a subset of my browsing, or form groups and direct links consistently to that group (TAEdTech, or a class grouping for example) then I might tend to use Diigo.  At the moment, Delicious does what I find useful in a social networking site, and so far I haven’t felt the need for the higher feature set.

Reference: I just came upon

Gabriela Grosseck, 2007, Using Delicious in Education: http://www.scribd.com/doc/212002/Using-delicious-In-Education