Rich Skrenta, DMOZ-founder and all round good guy, gives us a look into what is happening behind DMOZ at the moment.

“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“

Sounds like a comedy act.

DMOZ was good once, and it gave us the seed of the idea that we could collaborate, Web 2.0 stylee, and build something that the corporations couldn’t. But it didn’t scale. They barricaded the walls. DMOZ just lost the plot.

I very much doubt the same people who run DMOZ now will be able to create and run a new directory that will make big waves. Doing so would mean competing with Wikipedia, and Google, and the thousands of other directories. Then again, perhaps someone, somewhere in the system has some vision.

They’re probably buried alongside pending submission #48851942….