A few years ago, I was working with the communication staff of a city’s travel-and-tourism organization. One of the marketers on the staff had been assigned outreach to the Hispanic travel community, but hadn’t been able to find much through Google and other search tools.

I pointed her to Delicious and had her plug her search terms in. The treasure trove of content that resulted made her jaw drop. Not only did she find Hispanic travel links, but she found a couple people who routinely added new related pages, so she subscribed to the RSS feeds for their bookmarks related to the theme.

As Jon Udell points out, we’d lose more than the place we store our bookmarks should Yahoo simply shut Delicious down. In a screencast that dates back almost six years, Udell explains how Delicious has allowed people to negotiate metadata vocabularies (agree on the labels we’ll use for things and concepts) and extend the official taxonomies created by organizations.

In the wake of the revelation that Yahoo wants to be rid of Delicious (whether shutting it down or selling it off), a lot of posts have appeared offering alternative bookmarking sites. While these may offer a home in the cloud for your bookmarks, they won’t duplicate the amazing capabilities that have been created by Delicious users by virtue of sharing millions of bookmarks, enhancing them with tags that they have adjusted over time to develop a shared vocabulary.

Another one of those capabilities is construction of a list of links related to a specific topic, such as the links non-profit technologists have been sharing with the tag “NPTech.” According to ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick, these links—submitted by a number of different people—number in excess of 24,000. (I learned of Kirkpatrick’s post from Udell.)

It’s for this reason that I’m more interested in saving Delicious, with all bookmarks intact, than in exporting my bookmarks from the service and importing them into an alternative. Sure, I’d still have my bookmarks, but the real value I get from the service will have vanished.

I like Udell’s idea of turning Delicious into the online equivalent of a co-op, owned by its users, each of whom ponies up money to keep it going and each of whom owns shares.

Until such a model is feasible (sooner, I hope, rather than later), though, we’ll have little choice but to operate at the mercy of business decisions. Dan York refers to this as a “single point of failure,” but I wonder about the alternative. People have lost their money when banks have failed. They’ve been stranded in airports with worthless tickets when airlines suspended service. They’ve been left without replacement parts when car models were dropped. They’ve been left without support when a the software company stops supporting older versions. There was even an instance of passengers unable to continue on their cruise or get home when, while they were at a port of call, the cruise line ran out of money and stopped operations.

Is the online space really any different? How many social properties are there that are run entirely altruistically? And even individuals who do run a service out of the goodness of their hearts often abandon them for one reason or another. Shannon Whitley stopped ChatCatcher, which added tweets that linked to your blog post to your post’s comments. And my podcast used to feature a utility that let people record their audio comments directly from the podcast website, but MyChinga simply stopped working one day; when I contacted the guy behind the product, he informed me that it never really took off so he had decided to drop it.

Google’s Wave—now in the hands of Apache for distribution to anyone who wants to host Wave on a server—is a federated model that holds promise, but for how many social tools would it be a usable model? Could Digg operate that way? Flickr? YouTube? And even then, the utility is only as strong as the number of people using it. When something better comes along, even these could be abandoned by their hosts.

All of which suggests that no solution is perfect, that there’s always risk in linking up with an online service, whether it’s a social site like Delicious or a commercial site like Orbitz.com. They all run the risk of shutdown.

So I’m all for finding a new home for Delicious with all its current data intact. Moving my bookmarks to a new service is easy. Tapping into the goldmine of the aggregated bookmarks of Delicious’s community of users, not so much.