Some intresting conversations are coming up on the famous DMOZ directory, many are claiming that it’s future looks very grim and may coming to an end.
Rich Skrenta, DMOZ founder, gave us some info on what’s going on:
“Apparently the machine holding DMOZ in AOL ops crashed. Standard backups had been discontinued for some reason; during unsuccessful attempts to restore some of the lost data, ops blew away the rest of the existing data on the system.
So for the past 6 weeks, a few folks have been trying to patch the system back together again (reverse engineering from the latest RDF dump, I suppose). But 6 weeks is a very long outage. Add in the massive AOL layoffs last week, and it’s not clear if there’s even any left over there who cares. Even if some form of the ODP editing system is brought back, the likelihood of continued existence within AOL seems extremely doubtful.”
What’s going on there in the background no one knows for sure. All I am thinking about is the fact that the directory doesn’t offer any earnings to AOL so my guess would be that they will just terminate it. But really what I want to see happen is that AOL offers it for an auction so that some caring web user will save DMOZ.
Imagine a completely human controlled directory with no limits, a wikipedia of links if I may say so myself. With the authority that DMOZ holds it has potential to convert this failure into something greater.
The past couple of years haven’t been good to ODP to be exact but I thin the fact that search engines like google and yahoo still hold DMOZ listing sin high regard helps.
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